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THE 

FIRST CONGREGATIONAL 
CHURCH 
OF CINCINNATI 

(UNITAWAN) 



A HISTORY 



BY 

GEOKGE AUGUSTINE THAYER 

PASTOPv EMERITUS 



1917 



THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL 
CHURCH 

(UNITARIAN) 
OF CINCINNATI 



A HISTORICAL SKETCH 

WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE CHURCH OF THE 
REDEEMER, AND UNITY CHURCH 



BY 

GEORGE AUGUSTINE THAYER 

PASTOR EMERITUS 



CINCINNATI 
MAY, 1917 



Gilk 



OF CONGRESS 
iWASHlNGTOJfi 



A HISTORY OF THE 
FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH 
OF CINCINNATI 



THE year 1830, from which dates the corporate existence 
of the Unitarian church of Cincinnati, was in the midst 
of an American reHgious revolution which began on the North 
Atlantic coast, notably in Massachusetts, some fifteen years 
before, about 1815, and spread into the new West, largely 
under the influence of emigrants from those older states. 

This spiritual revolution known as the rise of organized 
Unitarianism, had indeed been quietly preparing for many 
years; for several of the ministers of the older Congregational 
Churches from the colonial days, and especially after the 
separation of the colonies from the mother country. Great 
Britain, had shown what then were termed liberal tendencies 
in their preaching, and some of them were openly charged by 
their more conservative fellow ministers with being disguised 
Socinians, this epithet being the prevalent term of odium 
against those who did not believe the doctrine of the Triune- 
God, one God in three persons. 

John Adams, of Massachusetts, the second President of 
the United States, who was frankly and openly a Unitarian, said 
that as early as 1750 many of the ministers of the most impor- 
tant New England Congregational Churches, as well as con- 
siderable numbers of laymen and women, were Unitarians, 
and in 1787, James Freeman, Minister of King's Chapel, in 
Boston, an Episcopal Church, was ordained as an avowedly 
Unitarian teacher, the first instance of a public recognition of 
the right of a Unitarian to hold a ministerial charge. 

Most of such liberal preaching was cautious and reserved 
in the expression of criticism or denial of the prevalent doc- 
trines; the hearers recognized its heretical drift rather by what 
was omitted than by any positive statements. But it was 
often remarked by those whose ears were alert for dangerous 
teaching, that from these liberal pulpits might be heard, year 
after year, sermons in which there was no allusion to such 

, 3 



fundamental doctrines as the atonement, justification by faith, 
election and eternal damnation. Discourses upon the con- 
duct of life, the beauty of holiness, the dignity of human 
nature, were the characteristic emphases of such preachers. 

Nor was this avoidance of controverted doctrines caused 
by timidity or by hypocrisy. Rather it was felt by the wisest 
of the Congregational ministers that doctrinal discourses upon 
points which had little relation to daily living, would inevitably 
tend to arouse resentment among the thoughtful and rational 
members of the churches, of whom there was an increasing 
number, as the nation grew older and richer, and so produce 
an open division among the churches, a schism and split, such 
as indeed came about a few years later. 

William Ellery Channing, minister of the Federal Street 
Church of Boston, who presently became the champion and 
leader of the pronounced Unitarian believers, said in those 
earlier days that differences of opinion upon obscure points of 
theology, like the nature of God, the character of the future 
life, the distinction between the divine and the human in the 
person of Jesus, must unavoidably arise in all honest religious 
thinking, and for the peace and reputation for intellectual 
respectability of the churches, they must be allowed to exist, 
while the churches attended to their more important duty of 
developing moral integrity and piety in their members. "We 
all think it best to preach what we esteem to be the truth, and 
to say very little about speculative error.^' Since theological 
doctrine has alv/ays been the breath of life of the majority of 
church members, lay and clerical, it was soon plain that such 
non-committalism upon the central doctrines of the ancient 
Christian Church would not long be tolerated by the conserva- 
tive element in the churches, and so there was presently an 
open break between the liberals and the orthodox of all the 
leading churches of New England. And before the year 1820 
most of the principal First Congregational Churches of the 
region, including those of Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, 
Plymouth, Cambridge, Salem and others, had arrayed them- 
selves deliberately and officially upon the Unitarian side. 

The decisive marshalling of the two sets of theological 
opponents, the Trinitarian Congregationalists and the Uni- 
tarian Congregationalists, dated from the year 1819, when 

4 



Channing preached an ordination sermon in Baltimore in which 
he maintained, for himself and the churches which were known 
to be in sympathy with him, that God existed in Unity and not 
in an unintelligible Trinity; that human nature was of God, 
for all its weaknesses, and not entirely depraved and hostile 
to all good, and that the Bible must be interpreted by enlight- 
ened reason which was the divine illumination in the soul of man. 

The Unitarian uprising marked a new Protestantism in 
America, an assertion of the right of new knowledge and new 
spiritual vision to take the place in the teachings of the Congre- 
gational churches — which, as the name Congregational signi- 
fied, were voluntary associations of self-governing people — of 
the old ideas of the past, many of which had become impossible 
of acceptance by enlightened and courageous minds. The 
movement spread over the country wherever the children 
of the Atlantic colonies dispersed to form settlements. 

Under the inspiration and guidance of officers of the Ameri- 
can Unitarian Association, which was formed in 1825, churches 
of the liberal faith were started in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 
1825; in Cincinnati and Louisville in 1830; in Buffalo in 1832; 
in New Orleans in 1833; in St. Louis in 1834; in Chicago in 
1836, and in Milwaukee in 1842. Most of these adopted the 
familiar name of First Congregational, but now and then 
other names were preferred, such as Church of the Messiah, 
which appellative was attached to the organizations in Louis- 
ville and St. Louis. 

While Cincinnati had no lack of churches when the propo- 
sition was made to establish here a Unitarian church, all such 
as were already upon the ground had as their basis of faith 
the doctrines which New England Unitarians had abandoned, 
as unsuited to the intelligence and moral sense of the times. 
The new Cincinnati church was therefore to be founded 
upon the ideas of the essential dignity of human nature; the 
impartial goodness of God, as right reason should understand 
goodness; "Nothing can be good in Him which evil is in me;" 
the trustworthiness of cultivated reason or intelligence in deal- 
ing with all doctrines whether in the Bible or elsewhere; and 
of emphasis upon character and conduct as the true tests of 
worth in the sight of God and men, rather than upon beliefs and 
ceremonials. 



5 



The men and women who undertook to establish this church 
were to a considerable extent of New England birth, so that 
they were influenced by the sentiments of their kindred across 
the continent; but others from more Southern states were 
interested in the undertaking, and it was not therefore a pro- 
vincial movement. Neither was theirs the Unitarianism of our 
present generation, which has dropped a number of the phrases 
and beliefs which were then deemed sacred parts of the true 
Christian doctrine. 

Reverence for the letter and unerring accuracy of the Bible; 
the ascription of a nature somewhere betwixt Deity and 
humanity to Jesus, and a veiled acceptance of the idea that 
happiness in the future life was conditioned upon church 
membership in this life, such were some of the ideas deemed 
important and vital in a basis of religious union which no longer 
find a place in Unitarian preaching. But an ancient difference 
which had disturbed the peace of the New England churches 
soon developed in this church. This was between those who 
were willing to participate in the celebration of the Communion 
or the Lord's Supper, and those who contented themselves 
with the maintenance of the church revenues and with attend- 
ance upon the services of worship, and were indisposed to call 
themselves religious communicants. 

In the early Summer of 1830, Rev. Charles Briggs, the 
representative of the American Unitarian Association, met a 
group of the friends of the proposed church, at some private 
house, and submitted a basis of organization to the following 
effect: "We, whose names are subjoined, having a firm 
belief in the Christian Revelation, and being desirous of making 
it the rule of our faith and practice, and advancing the cause 
of pure and undefiled religion, unite together to form a Christian 
church.'* Some twenty persons signed this agreement but 
when, in the following Autumn, Edward B. Hall, the first 
minister, proposed, after the uniform custom of the Unitarian 
churches, to have the Communion service, he found considerable 
reluctance upon the part of some of these signers to thus 
formally identify themselves with what they deemed a sur- 
vival of the old orthodoxy. Hence he proposed another formula 
which allowed a distinct classification of church members 
apart from church attendants and supporters, to the following 

6 



purport: ''I believe in the Holy Scriptures as the word of God, 
and receive them as the proper and only rule of faith and duty. 
I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, exalted to be a 
prince and savior, the mediator between God and man, the 
way, the truth and the life. On His religion I rest my hopes 
of salvation, His precepts I wish to obey, and I now unite 
myself to this church, to commemorate His love in the ordinance 
which He instituted and gave to His disciples, the Lord^s 
Supper. I do this as an expression of my firm faith in the 
divinity of His rehgion and my earnest desire to live as His 
disciple and become through the mercy of God an heir of sal- 
vation." To this covenant the following men and women 
subscribed their names: Timothy Flint, William Greene, 
William P. Rice, Abigail Flint, Peter R. Bryant, Timothy 
Walker, James Ryland, William E. Chamberlain, Em. H. 
Flint, William Donaldson, Mrs. Brigham, Mrs. Greene, Miss 
L. Lyman, CorneHa Brigham, Mrs. Smith, John R. Child, 
Hannah R. Child, T. Henry Yeatman, Robert Rands, Charles 
Fisher, Christian Donaldson, A. M. Donaldson, Mary Donald- 
son, Jane Donaldson, Jesse Smith, Charlotte Lyman, Francis 
Donaldson, Rebecca R. Stetson, M. A. H. Sampson, U. Tracy 
Howe, Abigail Thayer, Mary Jane Peabody, EHza Putnam. 
Other names were added in the course of the following years, 
down to 1855, when the then minister, Abiel Abbot Livermore, 
drew up a new covenant which remained as the basis of 
church fellowship until the substitution in 1879, by Rev. 
Charles William Wendte, of the formula of church union 
which up to the present writing has not been disturbed. 

Meanwhile the organization of a body of supporters of the 
proposed church had been completed by securing from the 
state government an act of incorporation of ''the First 
Congregational Church of Cincinnati, in the County of Hamil- 
ton," which was granted January 21, 1830, the petitioners for 
the act of incorporation being Elisha Brigham, William Greene, 
Nathan Guilford, Jesse Smith and Christian Donaldson. 

This formal establishment of a church corporation was, it 
would appear, the culmination of a series of gatherings for two 
or three years of sympathizers with the movement, both in 
private houses and in the Council chamber of the City Hall. 
The Rev. John Pierpont, one of the most influential of Boston 

7 



Unitarians, came to the city in 1828, preaching and visiting, 
and made report to the American Unitarian Association to 
the effect that the field was admirably suited to the mainte- 
nance of a successful Unitarian Chiirch. 

The expedition with which the church edifice was erected, 
so as to be dedicated on the twenty-third of May, 1830, indi- 
cates that the project was under way before the act of incorpora- 




Fourth and Race Streets— 1830 



tion. Indeed there is on record the purchase of a house and 
lot from. Isaac Condin for $3,700, for a Unitarian Church, on 
the 20th of May, 1829, and in the Cincinnati Directory of that 
year the Unitarian Church is included in the list of the city 
churches. The new house of worship was situated upon the 
southwest corner of Race and Foiu-th streets, not far from 
another more pretentious edifice of the Second Presbyterian 
Congregation. The entire cost of the completed building with 
its land was $10,512.48, a value which indicates the modesty 

8 



of its architecture. For the services of dedication the Reverend 
Bernard Whitman came from Massachusetts to preach the 
sermon and the Reverend John Pierpont contributed a hynm 
which remains upon a ''broadside'' preserved in the church 
records, as follows: 

Hymn for the dedication of the First Congregational Church 
of Cincinnati to the One Almighty God 



Composed for the occasion by Rev. John Pierpont of Boston. 



I 

To God, to God alone 

This temple have we reared; 
To God who holds a throne 

Unshaken and unshared. 
Who'st heard our prayers 
And blessed our cares, 

To Thee 'tis given. 



II 

O Thou whose bounty fills 

This plain so rich and wide. 
And makes its guardian hills 

Rejoice on every side. 
With shady tree 

And growing grain 

This decent fane 
We give to Thee. 



Ill 

Thou who hast ever stooped 

To load our land with good. 
Whose hand this vale hath scooped, 

And rolleth down its flood 
To the far sea — 

This house we raise 

And now with praise 
Devote to Thee. 



IV 

To all, 0 God of love, 

Dost Thou Thy footsteps show; 
The white and blue above. 

The green and gold below; 
The grove, the breeze, 

The morning's beam, 

The star, the stream 
They're seen in Thee. 

V 

Where now, in goodly show 

Thy domes of art are piled, 
Thy paths not long ago 

Dropped fatness on a wild. 
0 let us see 

Thy goings here 

Where now we rear 
A house for Thee. 



VI 

Nursed by the blessed dew. 

And Hght of Bethlehem's star, 
A vine on Calvary grew 

And cast its shade afar. 
A storm went by — 

One blooming bough 

Torn off, buds now 
Beneath our sky. 



9 



VII 



IX 



0 let no drought or blight 

This plant of Thine come nigh; 
But may the dew, all night, 

Upon its branches lie; 
Till towards this vine 

All flesh shall press. 

And taste and bless 
Its fruit and wine. 



VIII 

Because, 0 Lord, Thy grace 

Hath visited the West, 
And given our hearts a place 

Of worship and of rest; 
Old age and youth. 

The weak, the strong. 

Shall praise in song 
Thy grace and truth. 



The grace and truth that came 
By Thine annointed Son, 

Here let such lips proclaim 
As fire has fallen upon 

From out the high 

And holy place 

Where dwells in grace 

Thy Deity. 



X 

To Thee, to Thee alone, 

This temple have we reared — 
To Thee, before whose throne 

Unshaken and unshared, 
Sole king of heaven 

With thanks we bow — 

This temple now 
For praise is given. 



Our city at this time was a place rather of promise, as to 
its development in the respects which constitute modem ideas 
of sanitation and convenience, good government and archi- 
tectural beauty, than of achievement. Its population was 
about twenty thousand, made up from the somewhat hetero- 
geneous elements which have always formed the new settle- 
ments of the West, among these as today, a considerable 
number of negroes, perhaps one or two thousand, whose 
relation to the peace of the community was often more irri- 
tating than at the present day, since across the Ohio River was 
slave-holding territory from which runaways were numerous, 
to stir up political animosities. The majority of the white 
settlers were from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Ken- 
tucky; their standards of education and intellectual interest 
different from, and somewhat lower than those of the fewer 
natives of New England. From the latter class came the 
initiative of the public school system and some of the most 
active promoters of popular education were among the founders 
of the Unitarian Church, the name of one of them, Nathan 
Guilford, being borne by one of the handsomest of recent 
school buildings, that on Fourth street east of Broadway. 

10 



The existence of negro slavery at our doors was very- 
certain to become an occasion of vehement differences of civic 
and reUgious duty among the citizens, one class of whom, 
from the more northern states, had learned to view with 
abhorrence the possibility that human beings should be bought 
and sold as chattels and brought their prejudices to this new 
country; while another class, familiar at close hand with the 
slavery system, familiarity breeding indifference, were hardened 
as to its moral consequences, and found ample justification 
for its toleration in the economic prosperity which it brought to 
the free states. Cincinnati, for the succeeding thirty years, 
was a much frequented resort of the Southern planters, who 
came to spend their leisure at its hotels and amusement places, 
often accompanied by their personal negro servants, and 
making liberal purchases of the wares of the manufacturers 
and tradesmen. To offend these visitors and their neighbors 
by unfavorable comments upon the institution which gave 
them their wealth and social distinction, was apt to be deemed 
a crime against the community's welfare which the newspapers 
resented habitually, and which was not infrequently taken in 
hand by mobs who damaged the property and threatened the 
lives of the offenders. A good many of these personal servants, 
attending their masters and mistresses in their visits, made 
escape from servitude by the aid of white anti-slavery friends, 
who maintained a chain of shelters for such fugitives, where 
they were fed and guarded against the pursuers until they could 
be safely landed in Canada, which was out of the jurisdiction 
of United States custom and law. These shelters came to 
be known in popular parlance as underground railway stations, 
chiefly because the business of passing the fugitives along to 
their destination of freedom was carried on mostly by night, 
out of the observation of spies and other enemies. Several 
of such * 'stations" have been famous in our local history, the 
houses demolished quite recently, the participants in the process 
of forcible emancipation being well-known, respectable citizens 
even at the early periods when their business was dangerous 
to their personal safety. 

Since the ministers who were to take charge of the Unitarian 
church, from the first, were without exception, from New 
England, where hostility to slavery had been long a com- 

11 



monplace of moral teaching, it was inevitable that their ideas 
of the freedom and responsibilities of the pulpit would clash 
with much of the prevailing sentiment of the community, and 
thus it came to pass that the exercise of such frankness of 
criticism and condemnation of the slaveholders and their control 
of national politics became the rock of offence upon the part 
of at least two of the pastors, William Henry Channing and 
Monciire D. Conway, upon which their pastorate broke to 
pieces, the irritation of those within the chuixh who viewed 
their mode of discussion of such a sensitive subject as unwise 
and intemperate, joining with the anger of outsiders of the 
community and the denunciations of the daily newspapers, to 
make their tenure of the pastoral office unhappy and inexpe- 
dient of continuance. 

To these native elements of the growth of the town popu- 
lation were slowly being added some Eui'opean immigrants 
who reached our valley by the tedious roundabout course of 
landing at New Orleans and journejang up the Mississippi 
and the Ohio rivers, by steamboat when such conveyance was 
available, or by the more primitive process of flatboats "poled" 
upstream. 

By 1829 the nev/ly invented marvel of steam navigation 
had resulted in numerous fleets of side-wheelers and stern- 
wheelers in the larger rivers of the nation, the latter class 
adapted to the shallow streams; but the waters of the Ohio 
and its tributaries were not always at navigable depth for any 
craft of whatsoever light draught; railroads were not to come 
into general use until the forties and hence there were many 
discouragements to the daring Europeans who were ambitious 
of making their fortunes in the interior of our continent, who 
made their way by stagecoach over land or by small boats over 
the water. One such courageous adventm^er was Mrs. Frances 
Trollope, an English woman who sought to retrieve her domestic 
losses by establishing some commercial entei-prise in the new 
world. Her ''Bazaar," upon the present East Third Street, not 
far from the mimic log house which commemorates the site of 
the first settlement. Fort Washington, a warehouse of miscel- 
laneous commodities appealing to the tastes of the people, 
was a financial failure; but \^dth the elastic temper which sub- 
sequently made her prosperous as a storj^-wiiter, she tui'ned 

12 



her calamity in our neighborhood to good purpose in incorpo- 
rating her Cincinnati experiences into a story of her haps and 
mishaps in the new world called 'The Domestic Manners of 
Americans/' Mrs. Trollope's lively descriptions of the short- 
comings of our primitive social usages greatly scandalized our 
country-people at that time; but a later, less thin-skinned 
generation finds considerable amusement in the evident 
accuracy of a good many of her judgments, for ours was indeed 
a com_munity in the first processes of civilization, often untidy, 
unsanitary, illiterate, with many frontier habits, notably in 
the matter of strong drink, and infected by the Southern 
slavery methods of not undertaking until tomorrow what can 
be postponed today. Thus she reports that droves of hogs 
served as the habitual scavengers of the town streets, and that 
her newly occupied dwelling was destitute of cistern, pump, 
drain or any public means of disposing of rubbish and offal. 
But she joins to that of most other newcomers her unstinted 
admiration of the natural beauty and fertility of the region, 
with the river set between attractive banks of verdure, in an 
atmosphere unclouded by the modern smoke of factories and 
locomotives, the background of wooded hills, with many strange 
flowers and noble trees of unfamiliar species; and especially 
the abundant markets supplied by the farmers' wagons. Some 
of the most attractive residences were upon the Third Street 
terrace west of Vine Street, facing the river, where the leaders 
of the new congregation held the social gatherings of the church, 
and besides, made a reputation for hospitality to distinguished 
visitors from the Eastern states and from abroad, which 
contributed much to the fair fame of the community. 

Of the first active members of the congregation only a 
few men and women have left definite records in the city. 
Timothy Flint, whose name heads the subscription to the first 
of the church covenants, had been for several years a missionary 
sent by the Presbyterian church of Connecticut into the Missis- 
sippi valley, where he and his wife endured many hardships. 
Abandoning his office of Presbyterian missionary, in 1827, he 
became a resident of Cincinnati, which he had visited several 
times in the course of his itinerant duties, and remained for 
six years and a half, going farther South after this time for his 
health, and eventually dying in Massachusetts, in 1840. While 

13 



here he was a highly proHfic and notable literary worker, 
establishing among his many other activities, a magazine of 
religion, philanthropy and literature, called the ''Western 
Monthly Review," which like some other similar periodicals 
whose foundations were laid by members of the Unitarian 
congregation, was suited by its cultivated standards to but a 
limited constituency of educated persons and suspended its 
publication in three years. Later ventures in the literary 
field, conducted chiefly by the Unitarian leaders, were the 
"Western Messenger," edited by Messrs. Peabody, Perkins, 
Cranch, Gallagher and James Freeman Clarke of Louisville; the 
"Western Monthly Magazine," edited by James Hall, to which 
Perkins freely contributed; the "Cincinnati Mirror," a weekly 
paper conducted by Perkins, Gallagher and not unlikely, Flint; 
and "The Dial," estabhshed and chiefly written by Conway. 

Mr. Flint, who no longer desired to be recognized as a 
clergyman, was the author of several novels of distinction in 
their day; and of magazine articles of science and travel for 
numerous Eastern journals. But his most important writing 
was the History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley, in 
two volumes, pubHshed in 1828, which, with its appendix of 
description of the physical geography of the whole North 
American Continent, long held pre-eminence among such 
treatises throughout the country and still retains considerable 
value as a story of the pioneer conditions of this Western 
region. From the intellectual vigor of Flint, and his broad, 
advanced conceptions of the province of the chiirches which 
he thought were wasting precious strength and opportunity 
in sectarian theological discussion, when the age needed 
especially moral and spiritual guidance and stimulus, it 
may be presumed that the earliest suggestions of the formation 
of a liberal church came from him. In the first year of his 
residence in Cincinnati, in 1828, the "Pandect," a journal 
of orthodoxy among whose conspicuous writers was Rev. 
Joshua L. Wilson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, 
assailed Mr. Flint for heretical ideas in his "Monthly Review," 
and accused him, among other alleged offenses, of being a 
denier of the doctrine of the Trinity, which especial accusation 
Mr. FHnt acknowledged to be true. It was at this period that 
official Unitarian visitors from Boston came to consider the 



14 



field for the planting of a society of the new liberahsm; and 
the fact that the eventual title of the church, in its act of 
incorporation omitted the word Unitarian, an omission of 
which considerable importance was made in later legal contro- 
versies, gives color to the belief that Mr. Fhnt's influence 
was weighty in placing the church upon a basis which might 
invite membership from all shades of dissent from the severity 
of doctrine of other denominations. 

William Greene, Timothy Walker, James Ryland, John R. 
Child and Nathan Guilford, were influential men of affairs, 
in law and trade, whose heirs have survived to our time among 
the most honored citizens of the community. Messrs. Greene 
and Walker, especially, became through the following years 
of the vicissitudes of the church, its most devoted guides and 
counselors. Judge Walker remained through his life a resident 
of the city, but Mr. Greene returned to his native Rhode Island 
in his later days and died there. 

The first minister to be settled in the pastorate was Edward 
Brooks Hall, a graduate of Harvard College, in 1820, and 
minister of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 
1826 to 1829. His service lasted for only eight months, from 
September, 1830, to June 13, 1831. From November, 1832, 
he was the pastor of the important church in Providence, 
Rhode Island, in which office he died, March 3, 1866. 

A vacant pulpit of nearly a year welcomed an untried 
minister of twenty-five years of age, Ephraim Peabody, a 
graduate of Bowdoin College, in Maine, whose pastorate 
began May 20, 1832, and ended in February, 1836. The 
sermon of installation was delivered by Rev. James Walker, 
long the President of Harvard College and a notable preacher. 
Another participant in the services from New England was 
Rev. Francis Parkman, of Boston, who, although pastor for 
many years of one of the foremost of the Boston Unitarian 
churches, is more distinctly preserved to fame through his son, 
Francis, the author of the many brilliant and fascinating his- 
tories of the conflicts between the European settlers of North- 
western America and the Indian tribes. In the printed order 
of service for that day no names of participants are given; 
but of two original hymns written for the occasion, the first 
is reputed to have been from the hand of the candidate for 

15 



Installation, and the second from James Handasyd Perkins, 
then new to the city but for many subsequent years a striking 
and influential personality in the intellectual life of the city 
and of the church. 

The hymn ascribed to Mr. Peabody is as follows: 

O Thou before whose glorious brow, 
With veiling wings archangels bow, 

May our deep trembling prayer 
To mercy's ear accepted rise, 
Through the rich music of the skies, 

And blend harmonious there. 



Thou wert not in the earthquake's crash. 
Nor in the bannered lightning's flash, 

That flamed o'er mount and grove; 
But in the low, soft breath that stirred 
The conscious leaves Thy voice was heard, 

In mercy and in love. 

Lord let that sweet and holy strain 
Breathe through this dedicated fane, 

Thy blessing here descend; 
While praise and incense heavenward roll. 
Fill with Thy glory every soul, 

Our Father and our friend. 



May he whose pastoral hand shall guide 
This flock where living waters glide. 

Here angel-strengthened be. 
With unpolluted lips impart 
Immortal truths, and lift each heart 

Adoring unto Thee. 



The hymn which is printed among his compositions, in the 
memoir of Mr. Perkins by his friend, William Henry Channing, 
is as follows: 

That voice which bade the dead arise, 

And gave back vision to the blind. 
Is hushed, but when he sought the skies. 

Our Master left his word behind. 



'Twas not to bid the ocean roll, 

'Twas not to bid the hill be riven; 

No — 'twas to Hft the fainting soul, 
And lead the erring mind to heaven. 

16 



To heave a mountain from the heart; 

To bid those inner springs be stirred. 
Lord, to Thy servant here impart 

The more than wisdom of that word. 

Dwell, Father, round this earthly fane, 

And when its feeble walls decay, 
Be with us as we meet again. 

Within Thy halls of endless day. 

There is but scanty record of the activities of this ministry. 
As has been said above, the new pastor promptly organized 
the association of communicants, which from olden time in 
the Congregational churches, had existed in distinction from 
the parish, or company of attendants upon the Sunday worship, 
who helped to fill the pews and to pay the cost of maintenance 
of the services. It was a church within a church, made up of 
those who had passed through some distinctive phase of emotional 
exercise and become regenerated so as to accept the bread and 
wine of the communion or Lord's Supper which was usually 
observed upon the first Sunday of each month. One of the 
earliest sources of discontent with this somewhat arbitrary 
division between two classes of worshippers was the extent to 
which the Sunday morning congregation separated into a 
minority, who stayed in the pews upon the invitation of the 
minister given to "all those who deemed themselves worthy" 
or "those who believed in and loved the Lord Jesus Christ," 
and the majority who went to their several homes at once. 
That minority in the liberal churches became increasingly 
small; the wife often remaining while the husband went out; 
the moral difference if any was distinguishable, being hardly 
such as would affect the outside world's estimate of the merit 
of the two persons. 

In the critical year of the schism between the Liberals and 
the Orthodox in Massachusetts, 1820, the Supreme Court of 
Massachusetts was called upon to decide betwixt the claims of 
the two orders of parishioners to a possession of the property of 
the parish. The decision was in favor of the majority, who 
quite invariably were those who were not church members, 
a truly democratic judgment, which however, sometimes, it 
is feared, did injustice to the most faithful and generous sup- 

17 



porters of the religious life of the community. When this 
majority, who retained possession of the church building, 
included few or none of the ''communicants," it became neces- 
sary according to the tradition of the age, to form a new associa- 
tion of communicants whose bond of union was greatly simpli- 
fied over the ancient creeds, but which still, with some feeble- 
ness and reluctance, kept up the old separation between 
"members" and ''parishioners." Such v/as the association to 
which Mr. Peabody gave the foregoing statement of beliefs. 
The usual office of deacon was temporarily filled by Messrs. 
Timothy Flint and William P. Rice. 

In the first six years of its fife, the church had already 
made two changes of ministry, a process which was to be unhap- 
pily frequent for the next ten years. Benjamin Huntoon, of 
whom there is no further record, served the society from 
August, 1837, to May, 1838. And it was another year before 
William Henry Channing, a nephew of the famous Unitarian 
leader, William Ellery Channing, received an invitation to 
become the pastor of the flock, the call to the office being signed 
by a new set of Trustees, viz: Nathan Hastings, John C. 
Vaughan, Charles Fisher, Benjamin Urner, John S. Childs. 

For the first time in the church's history the dignity of a 
formal council of Congregational Churches for considering the 
merits of the pastoral candidate, was conferred upon the con- 
gregation on the 10th of May, 1839, representatives of five 
liberal Congregational churches taking part in the deliberations. 
These were Rev. Frederick A. Farley, of the Westminster 
Congregational Church of Providence, Rhode Island; a lay 
delegate, a Mr. Rowland, from the Brattle Square Church of 
Boston; Mr. Samuel St. John, Jr., from the church in Mobile, 
Alabama; Rev. James Freeman Clarke, of the Church of the 
Messiah, in Louisville, and Rev. William G. Eliot, of the 
Church of the Messiah, in St. Louis. The Council found no 
difficulty in approving the merits of the candidate, and the 
service of installation was completed by the participation of 
the visiting ministers. The sermon was by Mr. Farley; the 
prayer and right hand of fellowship by Mr. Clarke; the charge 
to the minister-elect and the address to the people by Mr. 
Eliot; and the two hymns of the occasion were contributed by 
the ever-ready lyrist of the congregation, James H. Perkins. 

18 



Mr. Channing had been a boyhood friend of Mr. Perkins 
and it was through the recommendation of the latter that the 
new minister begin his activities here. Channing had gradu- 
ated, in 1829, from Harvard College and had served for a year 
in New York City as Minister at large, that is, in service 
among the poor, before the Cincinnati invitation. He found a 
congregation of some two hundred persons, drawn from fifty 
or sixty families. The Sunday School had fifty children and 
fifteen teachers. With the enthusiasm of youth and of a highly 
emotional temperament he entered upon the task of shaping 
the new church according to high ideals of what the religion 
of a new age in the spirit of democracy should seek to accom- 
pUsh. Forty years later, in 1879, from his home in England 
where he passed some twenty-five of his last years, dying there 
in 1884, he wrote to a commemorative service in this his 
former church, 'There is coming a new era of Christiandom, 
the celestial signs of which will be the revival of real Christian 
life. Our nation of united freemen may be, if only wise enough 
to will it, the elect people to realize that divine ideal and so 
fulfill the desire of all nations, by organizing in every township 
of our Christian Commonwealth, perfect societies as heavens 
on earth." 

Among his projects for carrying into effect that vision of 
the perfect church was the proposed organization of "The 
Church of the Christian Brethren," as a substitute for the 
existing communicants' church, which had apparently failed to 
enlist the co-operation of some of the most valuable attendants 
upon the services of worship. This new organization was to 
meet upon the first Sunday afternoon of each month, for the 
observance of the Lord's Supper, joining in social worship, 
conversing and hearing addresses upon subjects of religion 
and philanthropy, and contributing to the charitable funds 
of the association. The members could exercise their discretion 
as to whether they would or would not partake of the Supper. 
The accompanying pledge of faith, required to complete the act 
of admission, was not essentially different from that already 
in force from the beginning of the Peabody pastorate. Inas- 
much as Mr. Channing's ministry ended not long after the 
formation of this association of Christian Brethren, its life was 
limited to the period of his presence in the church. 

19 



But matters of more stirring interest distracted the mind of 
the Congregation from its private aspirations after the elevation 
of the rehgious thought of the nation. No right-minded Uni- 
tarian minister, then or thereafter, could be contented to 
stand apart from the struggle for promoting social righteous- 
ness which had assumed widespread activity throughout the 
free states of the Union, as contrasted with the temper of those 
parts of the nation which were under the influence of the 
system of negro slavery which put under a ban all agitation 
of troublesome political and social problems. The two topics 
which pressed to the front of discussion, in which the Unitarian 
pastor felt morally bound to take part, were intemperance 
and slavery. 

Hard drinking had for a long period threatened the moral 
fibre of the nation and produced an awakening of public 
sentiment in favor of its severe control which, for many years, 
especially in the best educated portions of the Union, assumed 
much of the character of a revival of religion, with campaigns 
of oratory conducted often by eloquent reformed inebriates 
of a picturesque and pathetic quality, and the circulation of 
literature. The epoch of prohibition agitation and legislation 
had not yet come; moral suasion, the stirring of the sensibilities 
and of reasonable self-respect, was the dominant reliance 
of the agitation for moderation in drinking, if not of total 
abstinence. 

Mr. Channing, who was always ardent and zealous in what- 
soever cause he had at heart, preached much in favor of total 
abstinence; but although this sort of discourse was not received 
with the full approval of his hearers, its effects were not pro- 
foundly disturbing upon his congregation, unless perchance 
distillers were among its members. But his advocacy of the 
immediate settlement of the institution of negro slavery in 
the South by a national act of emancipation, and his frequent 
presentation of the horrible features of the working of the insti- 
tution, not alone in its cruelties to its victims but in its corrup- 
tion of the entire spiritual life of the white communities in 
which it existed as well as of the national politics, touched 
to the quick the sensibilities of the city. To large numbers of 
of om people slavery bore the aspect not chiefly of an offence 
against the first principles of republican government and 

20 



of human rights, but rather of an economic inheritance in 
which were impHcated many elements of the national existence 
which could not be rudely altered, at the summons of abstract 
theories of justice. That is to say, slavery had come down to 
the present generation from a period when toleration and 
approval of its existence were world-wide, and in the 
formation of the United States, although the evils and incon- 
gruities of the system were beginning to be the occasion of 
much heart-searching, even at the time of the adoption of the 
American Constitution which compromised the growing dif- 
ferences of opinion upon the subject between the North, where 
it had wholly disappeared, and the South, where it continued 
to be agriculturally profitable, yet the right to hold slaves was 
by national consent. Therefore, to threaten its existence 
and to stir up the temper of rebellion among the slaves aroused 
anger and fear, not only among the slave owners whose material 
prosperity was involved, but among all who felt the obligations 
to maintain the solemn pledges of the fathers of the nation, 
that the institution should be let alone in the states which 
had inherited and preserved it. 

Possibly if the true spirit of the founders of the Consti- 
tution, of accepting slavery as an unavoidable inherited 
disease of the body politic, not attempting to force its abolition 
upon the Southerners, but leaving it to die slowly of inanition, 
through the exhaustion of the soil cultivated by the shift- 
less methods of slave labor and the inability to obtain recruits 
from Africa for the supply of the needed workers, had pre- 
vailed in the South, there would not have been much violent 
agitation against it. But in an evil hour its friends began 
to assert its divine origin, as eternally meant for the weaker 
races in contact with the stronger, and to intrigue in Congress 
for its spread into newly acquired territory in Central 
America and on the Pacific Coast outside of our original bounda- 
ries, and even for the right to carry slaves, at convenience, into 
any northern community which the slave owner might be 
temporarily visiting. A slave was like any other domestic 
animal, to go with his master wherever business or pleasure 
called. In short, the slave system became aggressive, grasping 
for the extension of its domains, contemptuous of all moral 
ideals other than those which pertained to the economical 
welfare of the slave-holding community. 

21 



Hence the rapid rise in the free states of a new class of 
critics of slavery, besides that other company, known as aboli- 
tionists, who had long announced that any toleration of slavery, 
by the founders of the republic or their successors, was inde- 
fensibly wicked, and that the thing to do at once was to cast 
out the accursed thing from the land. This new class was 
composed of moderate minds who held that slavery had 
no right to extend itself, although it might be left undisturbed 
in its old territory. This latter class grew in numbers and in 
the high character of its members, until it attained control 
of the national government by the election of Abraham Lincoln 
as President. But the conservative multitude with its inflamed 
temper did not draw many nice distinctions between the two 
classes; it labelled them all abolitionists and Union destroyers. 

In view of the emotional quality of Channing's speech 
it may well be believed that his utterances were not concilia- 
tory of this excitable mood of the public. Not only did he 
preach upon the subject oftener than his unwilling congregation 
liked, but he gave notice from the pulpit of anti-slavery meetings 
and urged that speakers of that policy should be invited to 
occupy the pulpit. And at the Presidential election, in 
1840, he voted for the candidate of the anti-slavery or Liberty 
party, James G. Birney. It does not appear that this attitude 
toward the crying public problem directly caused Channing's 
short pastorate, but with other influences it made him dis- 
satisfied with his ministry; and his period of service closed in 
May, 1841. 

His friend, James Handasyd Perkins, a member of the 
congregation, was to bear the burden of spiritual guidance of 
the church for the larger part of the next ten years, although 
some of the most promising of the rising preachers of the 
Unitarian body came to supply the pulpit, some of them for 
several weeks, yet no choice of a permanent minister was 
made, and this, most likely, because Perkins entirely satisfied 
the needs of the congregation, if only he had been satisfied 
with his own fitness for the place. Born in Massachusetts, 
his education had been in private schools, and then in the 
commercial house of his grandfather, who was one of the mag- 
nates of the East India trade in which New England long 
held pre-eminence. But his ambitions were literary rather 

22 



than commercial, and, leaving the countinghouse, he came 
to our city in 1832, at the age of twenty-two, seeking that 
fortune which was frequently supposed by ardent imaginations 
in the Eastern states to await every seeker in the virgin fields 
of the unexplored West. While awaiting his opportunity 
of finding the niche for his talents, he was invited to study 
law in the office of Timothy Walker, and there he worked 
diligently until his admission to the bar, in 1834, and his mar- 
riage in the same year to Sarah Harte Elliott, of Guilford, 
Connecticut, whose acquaintance he made in one of the Uni- 
tarian families which she was visiting. His praises as to his 
high promise of distinction and his vigor of intellect were in 
the mouths of all who became intimate with him. Judge 
Walker records at a later day that Perkins' first appearance in 
a case in court left upon his memory that the young lawyer's 
argument was one of the most effective to which he had ever 
listened. But the practice of the law, especially under a good 
many of its associations with small minds of the profession, 
quickly became distasteful; Perkins could not conscientiously 
do much that was expected of an attorney in the advocacy 
of dubious causes; and he soon abandoned the profession and 
sought some other means of livelihood. He became by turns 
farmer, teacher, writer of reviews and stories for magazines, 
lecturer, worker for the better treatment of the poverty of 
the city. In this latter field he was more widely known by 
the community than for his other talents. The most important 
agency for poor relief upon rational principles which long existed 
as the channel of the public benevolence, the Relief Union, 
was devised by him and he served for many years as its Presi- 
dent. His literary versatility was great, he wrote upon a large 
variety of subjects, scientific, philosophic, and political, in 
prose and poetry; he seems to have been the official poet 
for occasions requiring recognition in verse. Especially 
was he effective in lectures upon popular themes; his voice was 
musical, his personal presence attractive; and whenever he 
occupied the Unitarian pulpit in relieving his friend Chan- 
ning, he was always acceptable as a religious teacher. The 
only reasons, then, why he did not immediately succeed 
Channing in the pulpit charge and find for himself a settled 
occupation with fair emoluments, were that he was to the end 

23 



of his life morbidly distrustful of his moral fitness to be a spirit- 
ual guide and that he was unwilling to be classed as a theolog- 
ical sectary, even of the Unitarian type. 

After his several years of intermittent service as pulpit 
supply, the occasion of his surrender of the office was his 
strong hostility to the establishment of a church which should 
call itself anti-Trinitarian or Unitarian. He wished for a 
church which should be as nearly as possible unsectarian, 
comprehending in its positive articles of faith the doctrines 
which were fundamental to all genuine Christianity, and 
which any person of tolerant spirit might join without the sacri- 
fice of the right of private opinion. That desire, as we have 
seen, actuated some of the founders of the Cincinnati church, 
in so far that the name Unitarian was not included in its 
corporate title. But when such critics of the alleged sectarian- 
ism of the word Unitarian sought other refuges for their longing 
to be free from bonds, they invariably wandered in vain, 
and were apt to be content to return to the only organized 
Christian society which did not impose upon its associates 
any test of soundness of theological opinion, whatever name 
it might prefer as a sign of the branch of fellowship among 
the truth seekers which it most honored. For the name. 
Unitarian, then as ever since, has covered less any aggressive 
hostility to the doctrine of the Trinity or other speculative 
opinions of orthodoxy than the spirit of Pope's verse "He 
can't be wrong whose life is in the right." 

But Perkins had entered upon a stormy stage of the church's 
history in its relation to the anti-slavery controversy which 
then overshadowed all other questions. He wrote in the begin- 
ning of his pulpit service to his friend Channing, in the East: 
"Unless you return, this Society will go to pieces. My clerical 
position here is most anomalous — ordained by the Trustees, 
never educated for the place, no pastor at all, uncertain how 
long I may stay; during the next six months I suppose some 
more certainty will be reached by our Society of their wishes 
and my connection with them; meanwhile I hang literally 
by my eyelashes." He also speaks of tempestuous times in 
the community over abolitionism, in which, however, although 
his views were unmistakably opposed to the aggressions of 
slavery, he made no demonstration which offended the sober 

24 



minded of the congregation. In the intervals of the visi- 
tations of candidates and of pulpit supplies who were not candi- 
dates but were interested in verifying the roseate accounts which 
had been spread in the East of the beauties of the Ohio Valley, 
and the exceptionally generous hospitality of some of its 
choice families, Mr. Perkins filled the gaps, ministering to the 
needs of the congregation, burying the dead and marrying 
the young. 

In 1846, five years after Channing's departure, Cornelius 
George Fenner, a Harvard College graduate, twenty-four 
years old, accepted the ministerial office, but after five months 
of service interrupted by sickness, from June to November, 
he died of consumption in the following January. Then in 
1847, Mr. Perkins resumed the pastoral care, and entered 
upon its duties with energy so that the survival of the church 
through a period of discouragement must be ascribed to his 
devotion. His life came to an untimely end by accidental 
drowning from an Ohio River ferryboat, December 14, 1849. 
The little farm upon which he had lived since 1845, upon 
the Madison road, which he named Owls' Nest, was occupied 
by his widow until her death, in 1885. The estate was later 
made a memorial gift to the City, by the children of Mr. and 
Mrs. Perkins, residing in Massachusetts, and is now dedicated 
for the pleasure of posterity as a public park under its old 
title of Owls' Nest. 

For the interest of those who have memories of the distin- 
guished leaders of the Unitarian body it is worth while to record 
that during the waiting periods when the church was without 
a regular pastor, some of the most notable Unitarian clergy- 
men of the country were its guests. Aaron Bancroft, Presi- 
dent of the American Unitarian Association and, like another 
minister above-mentioned deriving much of his fame from his 
more widely known son, George Bancroft, historian of the United 
States in its formative period; Henry W. Bellows, Cyrus A. 
Bartol, Samuel Osgood, Oliver Stearns, Andrew P. Peabody, 
Thomas Hill, were some of the best known of these visitors, 
whose presence gave distinction to the church and largely 
compensated by the power of their pulpit utterances, and 
the pleasure of hearing famous men, for the lack of pastoral 
oversight. 

25 



The difficulty in securing the minister who should be modest 
in his expectations and able to represent the rising faith of 
reason to a community which had in its population, for all 
the frontier limitations of some, men and women of fine critical 
intelligences, was increased beyond that ever-recurring lack 
of the right man for the important place, by the practical 
distance of Cincinnati from the chief source of supply of 
Unitarian ministers. New England; for distances are not 
measured so much by miles as by the time and inconvenience 
incurred in the travel. Massachusetts is now, by fast train, 
only twenty-four hours from Southern Ohio. In 1830 and 
1840 it was at best some five days; at worst much longer. 
A narrative of hardships during the journey from Baltimore 
to Cincinnati, in the summer of 1830, survives in a letter of 
Judge Timothy Walker. In the first part of the account he 
narrates, with a thrill of wonder, his experience in riding 
over the first portion of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, of 
which but a short section of the stretch towards Wheeling was 
in use. "We rode at the rate of twelve miles an hour without 
the least jarring. I think I could have written easily during 
the most rapid motion. When this great undertaking is 
finished I shall then be able to come from Cincinnati to Boston 
easily in five days." His actual journey was more tedious. 
"On Thursday, July 29th, at one in the morning, Cook and I 
left Baltimore for Wheeling in the mail stage over the Great 
Cumberland Road. We travelled night and day, stopping 
only long enough to eat, and reached Wheehng in seventy 
hours. We were twenty-five hours crossing the Alleghanies. 
Here the weather was sensibly cooler, but the road was the 
roughest I have ever travelled. On the whole I never v/as so 
much fatigued as when I reached Wheeling. We arrived at 
eleven Saturday night. Our fellow passengers were very 
agreeable and the time passed as cheerfully as we could expect. 
We told stories, talked politics, made our observations on 
the country, and now and then caught a short nap. We found 
the water in the Ohio so low that boats could not navigate 
without great difficulty, and it seemed that we should have 
to take the stage for another three days of excessive fatigue. 
We shall depart tomorrow at twelve, arriving in Cincinnati 
in two and a half days, that is on the 5th of August." 

26 



The following May of 1850, with the coming of Abiel 
Abbot Livermore as minister, marked the beginning of more 
stable pastorates. Born in 1811, graduating from Harvard 
College in 1833, he had been settled over a New Hampshire 
church, in Keene, for fourteen years, and therefore possessed 
the needed maturity of judgment which the parish required 
for restoring its attention to the main purpose of its existence, 
which was not social or national reform, howsoever vital issues 
these might be, but the proclamation of a religion which 
trusted the enlightened reason for its guidance into the way 
of spiritual peace. In short it accepted unreservedly its place 
among so-called Unitarian churches. A scholar, gentle of 
spirit, an excellent organizer, conciliatory in his attitude towards 
the other churches, he succeeded in placing the Society upon 
a healthy footing of service to the city and of development of 
its own resources for the upbuilding of a strong free church. 
One of the most important of his many enterprises for unifying 
the Western churches of the Unitarian faith, was the insti- 
gation of a Western Unitarian Conference, in 1852. This 
held its sessions in the church on Fourth and Race Streets, 
which even then according to Mr. Livermore's account, began 
to be a dark and smoky region, and drew together representa- 
tives, mostly ministers, of twelve of the neighboring churches, 
counting Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis as of the neighbor- 
hood, with a few delegates from the Eastern states. Com- 
munications were becoming more easy then; the railroads 
were multiplying. Nevertheless the cost and difficulty of 
long journeyings were, as they are even now, prohibitive of 
large gatherings. Sermons were preached by the Eastern 
visitors, Drs. Samuel K. Lothrop of Brattle Square, Boston; 
James Freeman Clarke, who, after a pioneer apprenticeship 
in the young Louisville society had removed to Boston to estab- 
lish the Church of the Disciples; George E. ElHs of Charles- 
town, Massachusetts; Charles Briggs, Secretary of the American 
Unitarian Association; and Thomas J. Mumford, of Detroit. 
William Greene presided. The Conference thus set in oper- 
ation was to continue with increasing efficiency in missionary 
diffusion of its faith into new communities of the West, for 
many following years, v/ith no especially agitating problems, 
until live years later at Alton, Illinois, when som_e anti-slavery 

27 



resolutions passed by a majority of the delegates caused the 
secession of a respectable minority of the members. And 
again in 1858, when the Conference returned to its birth- 
place in our city, a new subject of vigorous difference of opinion 
arose over the question. What constitutes a Christian? which 
was a forerunner of an advance step of theological belief 
among our churches, beyond the ancient problems of Trinity, 
Atonement, and Heaven and Hell. The new historical and 
Biblical criticism of which our later generation has heard much, 
and the new scientific ideas of evolution had entered into the 
arena of free debate among the churches, with the inevitable 
irritating effect which revolutionary ideas produce among people 
who have long assumed as divine matters of course, the con- 
ceptions of truth and righteousness handed down from former 
generations. This fermenting leaven was to have its most 
explosive influence under a later ministry than that of Mr. 
Livermore, who although open-minded, was for the most 
part satisfied with the current religious philosophy, which 
viewed the world as a field of constant miraculous interference 
by the Almighty, the Bible and the Christian church being 
especial and peculiar manifestations of God's activity in human 
affairs. The issue between law and miracle in nature and life, 
which has been discussed ardently since Darwin published the 
Origin of Species, in 1848, was not to be neglected by the 
Cincinnati church, which was bound to be affected, through 
its thoughtful men and women, by every fresh current of wisdom 
which moved the intelligent world in religion and in other 
fields. An evidence of the improved morale of the church, 
in getting out of its morbid self-consciousness as to whether 
it was to live or not to live, into active self-denial for the wel- 
fare of the denomination and the city, is shown in the list of 
charitable donations contributed during Mr. Livermore's 
ministry. These gifts averaged for several years, about twelve 
hundred dollars, the largest beneficiary at one time being 
Antioch College, of Yellow Springs, which received, in 1854, 
eleven hundred and fifty dollars, while in 1855, the Western 
Conference received three hundred and fifty dollars. 

The reconstruction of the basis of church membership 
engaged the leaders of the congregation under Mr. Liver- 
more's inspiration, with the result of an elaborate report made 

28 



to the congregation, July 15, 1855, signed by a special com- 
mittee previously appointed for the purpose, of Robert Hosea, 
Fayette Smith and the pastor, whose conclusions were ratified 
by what seems a practically unanimous vote of the adult 
members, more than two hundred men and women, whose 
names, as an interesting record of the former generation of 
Unitarians, will be printed in an appendix to this narrative. 
The substance of this new bond of union was as follows: 

"We, whose names are undersigned, having a firm faith in 
the Christian Revelation, and being desirous of making it 
the rule of our faith and practice, and of advancing the cause 
of pure and undefiled religion, unite together to form a Christian 
church, with the following Constitution and By-Laws: 

CONSTITUTION 

1 — ^Agreeably to the title in the charter, this body shall 
be known as the First Congregational Church of Cincinnati. 

2 — In addition to those persons who are qualified to be 
members under the Act of Incorporation, all who sign these 
articles shall become members, but a person may withdraw 
by filing a notice to that effect with the Secretary. 

3 — The officers of the Society shall consist of five Trustees, 
a majority of whom shall be owners of pews, to be elected by 
ballot at the annual meeting, and the Trustees shall choose 
a Chairman, a Secretary and a Treasurer of their board who 
shall also be the Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer of the 
Society. 

4 — It shall be the duty of the members and officers to 
co-operate together in promoting the objects of the Society 
by a regular attendance on its meetings and observance of 
the following By-Laws.'' 

These By-Laws, apart from that one which designates 
the time of the annual meeting as the first Monday of April, 
are the customary description of the duties of the officers. 

The provision that a majority of the Trustees should be 
pew owners was retained until changed usage with regard to 
the ownership of pews necessitated the abolition of this con- 
dition, in May, 1911. 

The literary tradition of the members of the church was 
maintained by both Mr. Livermore and his wife, the latter 

29 



writing some acceptable poetry and being the author of a 
novel, "Zoe or the Quadroon's Triumph/' Besides numerous 
contributions to the denominational periodicals, Mr. Livermore 
was best known in the churches by six volumes of popular 
commentary upon the New Testament. 

This pastorate was ended July 6, 1856, after a little longer 
than six years of service, the separation being largely due to 
the ill health of Mrs. Livermore. Mr. Livermore attained 
many denominational distinctions after his removal. For 
some years he was the editor of the Christian Inquirer, published 
in New York, and for twenty-seven years, from 1863 to 1890, 
was President of the Meadville, Pennsylvania, Theological 
School. He died in the town of his birth, Wilton, New Hamp- 
shire, November 28, 1892, at the age of eighty-one. 

There was little delay in the settlement of a successor in 
the pulpit. Moncure Daniel Conway, born in Virginia of a 
slave-holding family, trained in the Methodist church in which 
he began to preach at the age of nineteen, in Maryland churches, 
he came into contact with the Unitarian people of Baltimore, 
and by that touch of rationalism was persuaded that his 
spiritual home was no longer in the church of his ancestors 
but in some association where the mind could move with entire 
freedom to work out its problems of faith. He therefore 
entered the Divinity School of Harvard College in the Spring 
of 1853, graduating from there in the class of 1854. 

Mr. Conway has told the story of that momentous period 
in his development in the first volume of his Autobiography. 
Cambridge and Boston seemed to the young man whose 
mental experiences had been wholly in a rural community of 
plantations, to be the intellectual centre of the universe. 
Among the Unitarian ministers of the vicinity there were 
many notable scholars, who had studied abroad, an uncommon 
experience in the early part of the nineteenth century; and 
had brought home some strange and disturbing ideas of religion 
and science; which occasionally they were setting forth in their 
pulpits, although oftener confining their heresies to the limited 
readers of learned Reviews. The best known of these Boston 
preachers was Theodore Parker whose forum was the Music 
Hall, to which a free congregation of lovers of fair play had 
invited him from an obscure rural church in order that he 



30 



might freely discourse upon certain novel conceptions of faith 
which seemed to him most wholesome for the spiritual education 
of his time and country. The young divinity student soon 
made Parker's acquaintance first as a listener to his sermons, 
then as a visitor to his home. Although at first a little repelled 
by what seemed to him a hard intellectual quality, lacking 
the right infusion of emotion, in his preaching, that first judg- 
ment was soon softened as he obtained glimpses of the genuine 
reverences of Parker's discourses and prayers. His most 
ardent affections were directed towards Emerson, then living 
at Concord from which he wrote essays to a slowly appreciative 
world, or journeyed in lecture tours even into the Central 
West, wherever lyceum audiences dared to welcome a messenger 
of doctrines of the soul which some of his contemporaries 
called infidelity and some words without meaning. 

Parker introduced Conway to the anti-slavery sentiment of 
New England with its fervid hatred of human bondage any- 
where under the sun, but especially in the republic founded 
upon freedom and equality of human rights. He also gave him 
some acquaintance with a recently imported philosophy of 
the soul's relation to spiritual realities then known as trans- 
cendentalism of which philosophy Emerson was a disciple, 
without needing to import it from Europe; its purport being 
that the enlightened soul may have direct knowledge of things 
of God and of the highest human duty without the intervention 
of any miraculous book or church. Conway made frequent 
pilgrimages to Emerson's home from whence he carried away, 
besides his reverence for the wisdom and personal charm of 
that sage, an enthusiasm for the ideas of transcendentalism 
which he was to submit with all the confidence of a youthful 
convert to the Cincinnati congregation. 

The lay mind, as a rule is slower to adjust itself to changes 
of base in religion, than the clerical mind schooled to tolerable 
familiarity with different viewpoints of the generations, and 
Conway's daring novelties of opinion, discourses in disparage- 
ment of miracles and of the especial inspiration of the Bible, 
presented, it may be easily believed, with some impatience 
at the aversion of his hearers to ideas which seemed destructive 
of the foundations of the church, soon sowed the seeds of rebel- 
lion in the congregation. Combining with these his advanced 

31 



doctrines of the nature and sanctions of religion and his zealous 
hostility to slavery he afforded abundant matter for irritation 
among the mere conservative people of the community. Never- 
theless he was a popular speaker before a great variety of 
societies, Jews, German Turners, actors, Methodists, free think- 
ers; and maintained with unabated fertility the early traditions 
of the Unitarian ministers and laymen of appearing often in 
print. The most noteworthy of his publications was the 
"Monthly Dial," a journal of Hterature, philosophy and 
religion, issued in January, 1860, whose contents for the single 
year of its existence were mainly the work of the editor, although 
it was distinguished, in the eyes of a later generation, by 
original contributions from Emerson and from William Dean 
Howells, then first rising upon the horizon of American literature. 

On the first day of June, 1858, the young minister was 
married in his church to Ellen Davis Dana, a kinswoman of 
WilHam Greene, Rev. Dr. Furness journeying from Philadelphia 
to perform the ceremony. 

The period of his pastorate, from December 21, 1856, to 
November, 1862, was an exceedingly trying time for the leaders 
of any church, but particularly for the Unitarians; for in the 
region of politics the evident approach of a tremendous national 
crisis over slavery, which eventuated in the great war for the 
Union, from 1861 to 1865, made it impossible for conscientious 
preachers to refrain from speaking with intense feeling upon the 
patriotic duties of the hour. And whichsoever side they might 
justify, whether urging moderation and conciliation of the 
slave party or demanding that the encroachments of the 
South upon the rights of the North must cease at whatsoever 
cost, there was sure to be a division among the hearers of those 
who were in harmony with the speaker and those who were 
angry with him. Upon the theological side the new issue 
between old school and new with regard to the supernatural 
sanctions of Christianity caused sharp divisions of the Unitarian 
churches all over the country, seldom resulting in schisms 
in the individual churches, other than the withdrawal of 
attendants upon the Sunday services, but begetting a good 
deal of animosity between the supporters of the radical and 
the conservative preachers, the holdfasts and the innovators. 
The Cincinnati newspapers of the Spring of 1859 contain full 

32 



accounts of meetings in the church to discuss the basis of a 
division of the church property, between those who supported 
Mr. Conway and those who had determined to secede from 
the society and form a new church, to be called the Church 
of the Redeemer. 

The partisans upon both sides were influential and high 
minded men, although it was declared at some of the meetings 
that the spirit of politics had been introduced to bring in voters 
upon the disputed questions who had long since ceased to have 
any interest in the church or who had never been known as 
Unitarians till they had become followers of Mr. Conway. 
Among those who supported Mr. Conway, as reported in the 
daily newspapers, were Alphonzo Taft, George Hoadly, William 
Greene, WilHam S. Sampson, William Goodman, Charles 
Stetson, Caleb Allen, Stephen L. Wilder, William Wiswell, S. C. 
Boyden, Timothy Kirby, L. B. Harrison; while his critics 
included Manning F. Force, Robert Hosea, John Kebler, and 
Luther F. Potter. The proposed peaceful division of property 
which seemed at first likely to be made in a reasonably amicable 
temper, did not prevail because some member of the older 
church made an appeal to the Courts against the division, 
and it was only after Mr. Conway's removal that the injunction 
was raised and the division carried into effect. The Church of 
the Redeemer was established in the Winter of 1862 in a dis- 
used Universalist building upon the southwest corner of 
Mound and Sixth streets, and in January of 1863, Amory D. 
Mayo became its pastor, a post which he held for more than 
nine years, retiring in 1872. 

Mr. Conway left in November, 1862, so that the services 
of the First Church were conducted for the next four or five 
years by supplies from the East. A goodly number of bright 
men came for this purpose, among them Charles Gordon Ames, 
later known as the beloved minister of the Church of the 
Disciples in Boston, who occupied the pulpit for some months, 
and also found a wife among thepubhc schoolteachers of the city. 

In February of 1864, the house of worship upon Fourth 
and Race Streets, which had sheltered the congregation since its 
formation, was sold; and for the time the proceeds were retained 
by the Trustees, to be disposed of as later events might deter- 
mine. Meanwhile, services were held in halls, the room of 

33 



most frequent use being Hopkins' Hall on the corner of Elm and 
Fourth Streets. The Church of the Redeemer had thus 
the advantage of being worthily housed and of having a settled 
pastor; while the First Church depended upon pulpit supplies, 
until January 6, 1867, when Thomas Vickers became its 
minister. The congregation erected a new church edifice 

on the northeast corner of 
Plum and Eighth Streets, of 
brick, at a cost of some 
$36,000. This was dedicated, 
with a sermon by Robert 
Collyer, of Chicago, Novem- 
ber 6, 1870; the pastorate 
being held by Mr. Vickers 
until April 5, 1874, when he 
was appointed to the charge 
of the Public Library. 

If this congregation pos- 
sessed the title and the 
property of the Cincinnati 
Unitarian church, the new 
organization, the Church of 
the Redeemer, had the more 
enthusiasm and the larger 
share of the church workers. 
The minister, Mr. Mayo, took 
Plum and Eighth Streets — 1 870 an active interest in the public 

welfare, especially in the 
efficiency of the common schools. He was a preacher of a 
superior order of ability, of the conservative school; and 
worthily maintained the intellectual and moral standards 
of the previous ministries of the church. But his attitude 
of mind in theology, of holding to the ideas of a miraculous 
Christianity upon which, chiefly, the congregation had split 
into two churches, while Mr. Vickers was entirely imbued 
with the free critical spirit of his predecessor, Mr. Conway, 
showed itself in the part which he assumed in a controversy 
which greatly agitated the city upon the question of Bible 
reading in the public schools. Mr. Mayo advocated the 
retention of the old custom while Mr. Vickers upheld the action 

34 




which had been taken in the Board of Education of pro- 
hibiting rehgious instruction and the reading of rehgious 
books in the schools. The discussion with its attendant account 
of the proceedings of the Board of Education and the decision 
of the Superior Court, to whose jurisdiction that matter was 
carried upon an appeal of some citizens, was fully printed in 
one or two volumes which shows Mr. Vickers to be not only 
the better representative of prevalent public sentiment but 
the more brilliant and effective disputant. His arguments 
are witty, learned, and thorough. Mr. Mayo chiefly employed 
the appeal to fear of the Catholic Church whose opposition 
not only to Protestant teaching in the common schools but to 
all secular instruction was the moving force of the action of 
the School Board in eliminating the Bible reading. The Supe- 
rior Court consisted of Judges Hagans, Storer and Taft, the 
latter being Alphonzo Taft, a member of the First Congre- 
gational Church. The two judges who were of Orthodox 
church affiliations, voted to issue an injunction against the 
repeal of the Bible reading provision; and Judge Taft dissented 
from this decision. The Cincinnati municipal election which 
soon followed this judgment, on April 3, 1870, appeared to 
have chosen by a small margin, a majority of Bible men upon 
the new School Board; but when that body came to act it 
decided to ratify the action of its predecessors; and prohibit 
the rehgious instruction; and so the liberals won the day. 

An equally notable controversy which was published by the 
church in a volume of some 150 pages, in 1868, arose from a 
discourse given by Mr. Vickers at the laying of the corner- 
stone of St. John's German Protestant Church, September 29, 
1867. In the course of this address Mr. Vickers spoke of the 
place of the early Christian church as a sanctuary and refuge 
of the common people from the violence of rulers and as a 
nursery of the classical scholarship of the ancient world; "for 
centuries she was the only representative of science and culture.'' 
''But it was never possible for the mind to develop itself under 
her dominion; freedom of thought and investigation then as 
always since, have been treated by organized Christianity, 
especially in the Church of Rome, as heresies to be crushed. 
And for her hostility to the free activity of enlightened 
reason that church today is forsaken of all thinkers. It is 

35 



therefore the mission of a Hving church to become the sanctuary 
of free thought and to reconcile to rehgion, from which they 
have been long divorced, modem science and the modern 
intelligence." This discourse which was printed in the daily 
newspapers, was deemed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop, 
Purcell, to be an attack upon the foundations of his faith, 
and he made a \dolent retort upon the occasion of a dedication 
of one of his own churches. These swelled into lengthy corre- 
spondence in the Cincinnati Commercial, Gazette and Catholic 
Telegraph, with other sermons from Mr. Vickers in his own 
church, in all of which Mr. Vickers displayed much learning 
while avoiding the discreditable manifestations of bad temxper 
which were shown by his critic. Mr. Vickers resigned his 
pastorate April 5, 1874, and became the City PubHc Librarian, 
a post which he held for several years, becoming later a 
superintendent of schools in Portsmouth, Ohio. 

Mr, Mayo's ministry ended in 1872. His successor was 
Charles Noyes, a graduate of Harvard College in 1856, and 
previous to his Cincinnati call, minister for seven years at 
Northfield, Massachusetts. He was a man of high character 
and good abihty, and did much to conciliate the two parties, 
but the difficulties of the church in financial respects made 
his pastorate somewhat ineffective so that after a little more 
than two years of ser^dce, from January 5, 1873, to June 1, 
1875, he resigned to the regret of a goodly number of his 
people. He has recently died at the age of 83, in Norwich, 
Connecticut. 

With both churches without ministerial guidance and both 
deeply in debt, so that the new church on Plum and Eighth 
Streets was closed, the good sense of the active persons of the 
tw^o congregations recognized that the part of wisdom lay in 
adjusting the old differences which had faded into unim- 
portance and unite in one church. This action was hastened 
by the influence of Charles William Wendte, a graduate of 
the Harvard Divinity School, of 1869, and for six years minister 
of a Chicago church in which he had shown great organizing 
ability. ]\Ir. Wendte was invited by the Church of the 
Redeemer to become its minister, but he decHned to con- 
sider any proposal for a settlement which did not involve a 
cordial union of the two societies. Such a union was soon 



36 



effected by the co-operation, on the one hand of the Trustees 
of the Church of the Redeemer, John Kebler, Manning F. Force, 
Robert Hosea, Seth Evans and John W. Harper; and on the 
other hand of Alphonzo Taft, Thomas Vickers, Wilham Wis- 
well, John D. Caldwell and John F. Dair, representing the 
older organization. The united church accepted the old 
corporate title of the First Congregational Church and six 
Trustees were chosen, taken in equal number from each society, 
being Alphonzo Taft, Robert Hosea, William Wiswell, John 
Kebler, John D. Caldwell, Fayette Smith; Mr. Smith being 
the Church Treasurer; Theodore Stan wood and Frank R. 
Ellis were made a special committee, among many other com- 
mittees, for the arrangement of suitable music for the Sunday 
worship. 

Mr. Wendte's ministry was from January 19, 1876, to 
April 16, 1882. He worked during this period with unwearied 
energy, helping to relieve the church from its heavy debts, 
organizing young and old into manifold societies for the wel- 
fare of the church, and frequently bringing to the pulpit and 
to a lecture platform which continued to be a distinguished 
force for the city's education long after he had left Cincinnati, 
many notable personages. 

The united Congregation worshipped in the building of 
the Church of the Redeemer, on Sixth and Mound Streets, 
until the sale of that edifice in 1879, when the long-vacant 
church on Plum and Eighth Streets was put into order and 
occupied April 13. 

The old debt continued to be so onerous that Mr. Wendte 
announced that he could not continue his ministry unless some 
vigorous measures were immediately undertaken for the dis- 
charge of the indebtedness which amounted to more than 
$29,000. This effort was at once set on foot. The proceeds 
of sale of the Mound Street Church were $12,000, and more 
than $7,000 was raised by subscription. The reduction 
left conditions more tolerable, but the load was still heavy 
and therefore, two years later, a strenuous movement for 
the final disposition of the debt was so far successful as to obtain 
pledges for immediate or future payment of the remaining 
$11,705. To this sum a new organization of the younger 
people of the church, reinforced by some outsiders, known as 

37 



The Unity Club, promised $2,000, while the Ladies' Aid Society 
agreed to give $1,000. The Unity Club became a very useful 
auxiliary of the church, as well in the matter of money raising 
as in promoting an educational campaign for the benefit of 
the community. In the later years of its existence which 
continued until the removal of the congregation to its present 
house on the Reading Road, it conducted regular literary 
studies, with weekly meetings, which often attracted large 
companies of men and women to the vestry, a good many of 
these persons having no other identification with the church. 

But in its beginnings it was ambitious of more public 
and financially profitable activities than quiet discussion of 
books, and engaged in elaborate public entertainments in the 
leading theatre. Pike's Opera House. Among these notable 
exhibitions was the performance of the comic opera of Pinafore, 
twice repeated, and the presentation of the operetta of the 
Doctor of Alcantara with the aid of Theodore Thomas' famous 
symphony orchestra. With the proceeds of such enterprises 
added to numerous smaller affairs, not only were the $2,000 
pledged to the church debt paid, but another thousand dollars 
went towards the purchase of a church organ, while the Associ- 
ated Charities and similar public benevolences received gener- 
ous gifts. The leading officers of the Club during these early 
enterprises were Edward Goepper, President; William H. Taft 
and James B. Stan wood, Vice-Presidents, and Stephen H. 
Wilder, Secretary. 

More lasting in influence was the series of Sunday after- 
noon popular lectures begun in 1880, in Pike's Opera House 
and continued in the Grand Opera House under the pastorate 
of Mr. Wendte's successor, Mr. Thayer, until 1910, when the 
competition of the moving picture exhibits and other Sunday 
afternoon diversions made it necessary to put an end to a 
course which had been of remarkable continuous success, 
usually filling the opera house, at the popular entrance price of 
fifteen cents. Albert W. Whelpley, the Public Librarian, 
and chairman of the Unity Club special lecture committee, 
with Harold Ryland acting as treasurer of the Sunday receipts, 
assumed the chief part of the conduct and planning of the lec- 
tures, which had a judicious admixture of the amusing and 
picturesque, and the instructive. Among the more notable 

38 



lecturers, some of whom appeared annually for several courses, 
were Wendell Phillips, Mary A. Livermore, William Parsons, 
Thomas Hughes, George J. Holyoke, A. R. Proctor, eminent 
English astronomer, Edward S. Morse, with addresses upon 
various phases of scientific evolution of which he was a dis- 
tinguished teacher; Archibald Forbes, and James E. Murdoch, 
our fellow-citizen of distinction in the dramatic art. At first 
viewed with disapproval by the orthodox as an entering wedge 
of the violation of the sanctity of Sunday, these lectures 
eventually came to be recognized as serving an important 
office of profitable opportunity for the people who were not 
habitual churchgoers, and the many others to whom Sunday 
afternoon was an idle time. The coming of Wendell Phillips 
had its especially dramatic significance; for twenty years 
before, in the height of the anti-slavery agitation and on the 
verge of the war for the Union, Mr. Phillips had attempted to 
speak from the same platform and was received with mob 
violence. Now he discoursed to a receptive audience upon 
the life work of his great collaborator in the abolition cause, 
William Lloyd Garrison, and was entertained with honor by 
prominent citizens. 

Another public service in which Mr. Wendte took the 
foremost initiative was the organization of the Associated 
Charities, a new type of philanthropic work for the intelligent 
treatment of poverty, in place of the traditional methods of 
poor relief. This new organization, which has now largely 
superseded the antiquated fashion of giving to whosoever 
asked and making little investigation into the daily life of the 
recipient, had some of its most faithful supporters in the 
members of the church, led by its minister. And to this day 
that active co-operation of the church with all forms of public 
service has been maintained. 

In January, 1880, the half century of organized Unitarian- 
ism in this city was celebrated by services in the church, on 
Eighth and Plum Streets, which consisted chiefly in reading 
many letters of congratulation from ministers and laymen 
in other cities who had taken some part from year to year 
in the history of the church. These services have been recorded 
in a pamphlet, pubHshed by the congregation. Memorials 
of the Fiftieth anniversary of the First Congregational Church 

39 



of Cincinnati, in which is contained the first attempt at a history 
of the society. 

Of the church members of this period that one who has 
left the most lasting memorial of a lifework was Sallie Ellis, 
a mature woman incapacitated for active affairs by chronic 
invaHdism, who evolved the idea of systematic distribution 
through the mail of Unitarian literature, a project which eventu- 
ally was copied by many other churches throughout the country. 
The rise and progress of that activity which became known as 
the Post Office Mission has been described, effectively, in the 
story of Miss Ellis' life, written by Mrs. Fayette Smith of the 
church, "SaUie Ellis' Mission.'' 

In February, 1882, Mr. Wendte closed his pastorate which 
had involved the settlement of many difficult problems and the 
expenditure of much nervous force, which made a change of 
field desirable. His later pastorates were in Newport, Rhode 
Island; Oakland, California; Los Angeles; Newton Centre, 
Massachusetts; Boston (the Theodore Parker Memorial) 
and Brighton, Massachusetts. For several years until his 
recent retirement he occupied the important post of Secretary 
of the Department of Foreign Relations of the American 
Unitarian Association, in which responsibility he organized 
and inspired a series of international congresses of Liberal 
believers which have been held at many capitals of the old 
and the new world. For his services in this domain he was hon- 
ored by the academic distinction of Doctor of Sacred Theology 
from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. 

Upon his decision to withdraw, Mr. Wendte entered into 
correspondence with his Divinity School classmate, George 
Augustine Thayer, then settled for thirteen years over the 
Hawes Church in Boston, to persuade him to consider the 
possibility of undertaking the charge of the Cincinnati church. 
A visit to this city in the latter part of March, 1882, and the 
occupation of the pulpit for two Sundays, resulted in a prompt 
invitation, under date of April 7, 1882, signed by Fayette Smith 
and Aaron B. Champion, respectively the President and the 
Secretary of the Trustees, to Mr. Thayer to become the pastor 
of the church. This invitation was accepted in the course of 
the Summer and on Sunday, October 1, 1882, he began his 
ministry here, which continued until Sunday, January 9, 1916, 

40 



when he was retired with the honorary title of Pastor Emeritus. 
The services of installation of the new minister were held on 
the evening of Thursday, October 5, 1882. President Fayette 
Smith of the Trustees made the opening address of installation 
in behalf of the congregation, and the following ministers 
bore parts in the service, viz., Samuel R. Calthrop, of Syracuse, 
N. Y., preached the sermon; George W. Cutter, of Buffalo, 
offered the prayer; William H. Ryder, of the Cincinnati Uni- 
versalist Church, read the Scriptures; Jenkin Lloyd Jones, 
of Chicago, gave the Right Hand of Fellowship, and John 
Snyder, of Saint Louis, and Frederick L. Hosmer, of Cleveland, 
made addresses upon the mutual relations of minister and people. 

His predecessor had established the custom of a free use 
of printer's ink, in the way of newspaper advertisements and 
church circulars for the spread of the public acquaintance 
with our doctrines and the reason for our existence among the 
city churches, and this habit was maintained by Mr. Thayer. 
The Cincinnati Commercial, one of the morning papers, edited 
by Murat Halstead, was especially generous in its offers of 
space for the publication of accounts of the church activities, 
many sermons and special addresses being printed in full in 
the Monday morning columns. Among such publications 
which occasioned much notice by the community and which 
may be alleged without excessive pretension, to have contrib- 
uted an effective part towards the awakening of civic pride 
for a much-needed uplift of the character of the city govern- 
ment, were several Sunday evening discourses in the Autumn 
of 1885, upon some diseases of the body poHtic; the subjects 
being: The Crime against the ballot; The misgovemment of 
a great city; The saloon as a social regulator; and The menace 
to the public schools. 

The early years of this ministry were subject to some 
disturbances of the usual placid order of the community 
which had considerable effect upon church attendance. 
The Ohio River, which had not gone beyond its banks for a 
generation, reached excessive high-water mark in 1883, but 
in February, 1884, it transcended all recorded experiences 
in the height of its flood, which covered many hundreds of 
dwellings and business houses in the lower terraces of the valley 
and submerged the gas-works so that the streets were without 

41 



light for about a week, except from house windows, and a 
wedding which took place in the church had to depend for its 
illumination upon oil lamps. This flood hastened the removal 
of many families to the suburbs. 

Close upon the heels of this misfortune came a serious 
civic explosion, which was a symptom of a radical disease 
in the body politic. This was the notorious Courthouse riot 
of March, 1884. The occasion of the outbreak was a series 
of miscarriages of justice in the criminal courts of Hamilton 
County, with regard to several homicides, some of them of 
an aggravated type, whose perpetrators were left for weeks 
in the county jail without trial or were sentenced to moderate 
penalties. A mass meeting held in Music Hall on the evening 
of March 28, 1884, for protest against the law's inexcusable 
delays, had been addressed by well-known respectable citizens 
in severe criticism of the courts, but, as Mr. Thayer had 
occasion to report to his congregation on the Sunday in the 
midst of the terror prevalent during the outbreak, none of 
the orators mentioned the specific cause of the disgrace whose 
cure was not far to seek, in the municipal apathy which allowed 
corrupt party politicians to fili the judicial offices with their 
own legal tools. When so-called bosses selected the judges 
and these party managers were often gamblers, saloon keepers 
and other lawless men, it inevitably followed that the courts 
would be incompetent and venal. For it should be recorded 
for the benefit of posterity that even to the present writing, 
as through most of the history of Ohio, the office of judge of 
the courts of law has been elective like all other offices, and 
therefore subject to all the manipulations of party politics 
which notoriously for many years abounded in frauds and 
violent assaults upon the rights of the free voter. The city 
election was but ten days ahead, when a judge of the Superior 
Court, a clerk of the Police Court and two magistrates were 
to be chosen and there were five or six thousand voters in the 
hall. But taking no hint from these facts, the indignation 
of the meeting effervesced in some violent resolutions, and 
the return to their homes of the majority of the attendants. 
A few of the audience were disposed to make tangible show 
of their feelings and drifted towards the Courthouse, upon 
the site of the present building, to make some noisy demon- 

42 



strations and perchance to scare the inmates of the jail. As 
is common with the harmless impulses of mobs, the demon- 
strations developed into violent attempts to break open the 
jail doors, and, thwarted in these, in attacks upon the adjoining 
Courthouse, setting it on fire, and piHng upon the flames 
precious court records, books and furniture, meanwhile resisting 
the efforts of the firemen to extinguish the flames by cutting 
the hose. For the larger part of a week the vicinity of the 
conflagrations was filled with the shouts and shots of the 
contending mob and the state militia, some thousands of whom 
were called to the emergency. A considerable number of the 
rioters and some peaceable citizens were killed and business 
in the main city was at a standstill. 

The long standing traditions of the participation of the 
minister of the church in discussion of political problems again 
asserted themselves, although this time in a direction in which 
there was not likely to be any discord among the members of 
the congregation. The riot was a furious manifestation of 
radical ails in the system of the local government; there was 
excessive partisanship and small public spirit and courage 
to resist evil, among the voters; and to awaken the citizens 
to the only remedy of malign civic conditions became the self- 
appointed task of a group of leading citizens, known as the Com- 
mittee of One Hundred, which had been at first appointed 
by the Mayor during the progress of the riot, but which con- 
tinued its existence for two years after. Of this committee 
Mr. Thayer was a member and an appeal to the legal voters 
of Cincinnati to do their duty at the election of April 5, 1886, 
widely circulated through handbills, was written by him 
at the request of the Chairman of the Committee, Isaac J. 
Miller. That active concern for honest local government 
independent of docile subserviency to party claims, has always 
been maintained in this ministry, one of the latest mani- 
festations being in the Presidency of the City Club for three 
years held by Mr. Thayer and a cordial expression of appreci- 
ation of the value of his work in this field being given upon his 
retirement from the office at a public dinner at the Gibson 
House, April 10, 1915. 

The Unity Club continued to be active in various ways; 
its membership in 1885 numbering 225 persons of whom 

43 



many were outside of the regular church members. The 
Sunday afternoon Grand Opera House lectures maintained their 
popularity; the Wednesday evening Hterary meetings of the 
Club had some especially enthusiastic sessions under the 
Presidency of Judge D. Thew Wright, Aaron B. Champion, 
E. Cortlandt Williams, and William H. Knight, and initiated 
plans for the establishment of a Day Nursery for the care, 
during working hours, of the babies of poor mothers who had 
to give their hours of daylight to labor away from their homes. 
This benevolence was soon turned over to the control of a 
committee of the church women, who for several years supported 
some attractive rooms at 544 Race Street, in charge of a 
capable nurse; and for a short period maintained a second 
nursery upon East Third Street. A very generous portion 
of the cost of maintenance of these nurseries was given by 
Mrs. Maria Longworth Nichols. The nurseries were eventually 
closed for lack of patronage by the mothers, who preferred 
to risk their children in locked homes, or under the care of 
other children, than to pay the moderate charge of two cents 
a day. The abandonment of the Third Street institution was 
also due to certain sectarian religious prejudices, although 
care was always taken by the managers to avoid any semblance 
of theological expression to the patrons. 

In 1886, on the 11th to the 14th of May, the Western 
Unitarian Conference met in the church with an attendance 
of eighty-three delegates, including the six persons appointed 
to represent the Cincinnati Church, viz. : Mr. and Mrs. George 
Thornton, Robert Hosea, Fayette Smith, John D. Caldwell, 
and Alice Williams Brotherton. Mrs. Fayette Smith, repre- 
senting the Woman's Auxiliary Society, the old title for the 
Woman's Alliance, and Mr. Thayer, were also delegates ex 
officiis. This session became notable in the annals of Western 
Unitarianism for its warm discussion of what was termed 
for many later years as The Western Issue; whose substance 
was a proposition to omit the words Christian and God from 
the Conference statement of faith, not because any member 
of the Conference disbelieved in either of the terms, as reason- 
ably interpreted, but for the sake of certain tender consciences 
of men and women who were in essential agreement with the 
best religious and moral sentiments of our Unitarian churches 

44 



but to whom even the most venerable terms of ancient creeds 
savored of exclusiveness; the Hfe and moral ideals of each 
soul being the vital things, which might be expressed in new 
forms of words which had no reminiscence of ancient feuds 
and bigotries. The objections to this proposition to enlarge 
the terms of Conference fellowship were of two kinds. One 
class of opponents attached great value to the identification 
of the Unitarian church with the especial traditions of Christi- 
anity, and moved to make the allegiance to Christianity more 
explicit than it had been in previous platforms. The other 
class, with whom Mr. Thayer and a part of the Cincinnati 
delegation acted, held that it was beyond the province of a 
conference of independent congregations to speak for the whole 
body except under definite instruction from the individual 
churches; and that any decision which the meeting might make 
would give a false impression of the sentiment of Western 
Unitarians as a body since only a few individual delegates, 
and not every distinct church, would be behind the vote. 
There was a good deal of heat and storm in the convention 
during the discussion, which was disturbed much by tempestu- 
ous conditions of the weather. A series of tropical rains fell 
nearly every day, flooding the streets and making travel 
difficult, while the temperature was high. Eventually the 
advanced proposition was carried in the closing hours of the 
Conference, only thirty persons remaining to cast the vote. 
The matter was vigorously agitated all through the Unitarian 
churches of the country for the rest of the year, and the debate 
was resumed in the Spring of 1887, at Chicago, where a fuller 
delegation reiterated the conclusion of the Cincinnati Confer- 
ence, but with the qualifying explanation that the statement 
thus agreed upon expressed the opinions of those alone who 
joined in the declaration. Twenty-nine years later, the Western 
Conference returned once more to Cincinnati under more 
harmonious conditions which effaced any possible lingering 
grievance; and the sessions of that week of May, 1915, with 
the hospitality extended upon a scale not precedented in 
previous gatherings, have remained as among the most satis- 
factory in the history of the Conference. 

The ordinary revenues of the church, while sufficient to 
meet current expenses, had not a surplus needed to pay some 

45 



remnants of old indebtedness. Hence the treasury reported 
a deficit of $1,600 at the close of 1884, which was met by the 
subscriptions of twenty men and women. 

But one cause of the slow increase of the church income was 
the movement of population of the class from which the congre- 
gation was likely to be drawn towards the cleaner air and 
wider spaces of the hilltop suburbs of Clifton, Walnut Hills, 
Mt. Auburn and Avondale. The journey to town was slow 
by horse cars, and only the most devoted churchgoers were 
wilHng to make the long passage on Sundays, when the mornings 
and evenings of the working days had been spent by many 
of the male members of the families in the same tedious journey. 
All the downtown churches began to feel the strain upon their 
successful existence caused by these changes of residence. 
The Orthodox denominations met the condition by estabhshing 
new churches in these several suburbs; and some experiments 
were made towards testing such a possibility for the Unitarian 
church. Sunday afternoon services were held, first in the 
private school building of White and Sykes, on McMillan 
Street near Gilbert Avenue and later in the pubUc school house 
in Avondale. A Sunday School of thirty members assembled 
for a season in the residence of R. B. Field upon Walnut 
Hills, and afterwards in the more spacious residence of Mrs. 
Thomas T. Haydock. But none of these undertakings prom- 
ised permanence. On Saturday afternoon, October 22, 1887, 
a meeting of the congregation was called to consider the recom- 
mendation of a previously appointed committee, consisting of 
Joseph W. Wayne, George Thornton, Charles Truesdale, Charles 
A. Kebler and George A. Thayer, that a lot of land upon the 
northwest corner of the Reading Road and Linton Street be 
purchased as a site for a new church, and that a mortgage of 
$15,000 be placed upon the present church property for that 
purpose. Eighteen persons voted in favor of this action and six 
voted against it. At the annual meeting of the congregation, 
January 25, 1888, plans for a church edifice, drawn by James W. 
McLaughlin, architect, were submitted. On the afternoon of 
May 3, 1888, the formahty of turning the sod for the coming 
building was participated in by the following company: Mr. 
Thayer and George Thornton who represented the mascuhne 
element of the church; Mrs. Theodore Stanwood, Miss Elizabeth 

46 



Stanwood, Mrs. Joseph Wilby, Mrs. Seth Evans, Mrs. Fayette 
Smith, Mrs. Frederick Brown, Mrs. George A. Thayer, Miss Elsie 
Field and Miss Elizabeth Goepper; and the following children, 
viz.: Ruth Wilby, Agnes Smith and Abbot Thayer. 

Satisfactory offers not having been received for the pur- 
chase of the property on Eighth and Plum Streets, a special 
meeting of the congregation, held at five p. m., of May 7, 1888, 
authorized the Trustees to pledge the property as security 
for bonds to the value of $20,000 for the erection of the new 
building. The officers of this meeting were Judge Fayette 
Smith, Chairman, and Aaron B. Champion, Secretary. The 
motion to give the desired authority to the Trustees was made 
by Seth Evans and seconded by Judge Manning F. Force. 
The Trustees were Melville E. Ingalls, Aaron B. Champion, 
Edward Goepper, Charles A. Kebler, Herman Duhme and 
James B. Stanwood. The plans which had been drawn by 
architect McLaughlin, were put into the hands of the follow- 
ing contractors for execution; viz.: J. W. Cotteral and Co., 
builders; Dennis Flaherty and Brothers, masons; Scully, 
plasterer; Gibson, plumber; BertHng Brothers, painters; and 
Witt and Brown, roofers. $10,500 was paid for the land and 
the original estimate for construction was $18,500; to which 
sum about a thousand dollars was later added. There was, 
as is often the case, an unexpected delay in completing the 
building, so that it was not ready for occupation until March 
10, 1889. Before the carpets were laid a ''Kermess," for raising 
funds was held upon the church floor with proceeds of $800. 
The first preaching service was held Sunday, March 10, 1889, 
with an audience of 170. The public dedication was on 
Wednesday evening, March 27, the audience filling the house. 
Rev. Dr. Minot J. Savage, of Boston, preached the sermon, 
Rev. Frederick L. Hosmer, of Cleveland, offered the prayer, 
and other participants were Rev. David Philipson, of the Mound 
Street Jewish Temple, Rev. E. W. Whitney, pastor of the 
Universalist Church, and Rev. Judson Fisher. Original hymns 
for the occasion were contributed by Alice Williams Brotherton 
and Virginia Ellard. A Sunday School of fifty members was 
organized. 

Meanwhile, during the process of discussion of the removal 
of the church to its new location, an active movement was 

47 



on foot among some of the members to form a new church 
with its worship near the old location. This action was a 
manifestation of an invariable experience in every large city 
where there is but one Unitarian church of reluctance upon 
the part of many worthy persons to recognize that the churches 
must conform to the changes of centre of the residences. 
In a circular letter sent to the members of his congregation 
and to the Unitarian missionary organizations which might be 
interested, Mr. Thayer set forth the reasons which actuated 
the leaders of the proposed church removal by some statistics 
which showed that for several years there had been a steady 
drift of members to the suburbs and only in rare instances 
the settlement in the lower city of any family which joined 
our church. Already a slight majority of families contributing 
to the church were in the suburbs, and even while the resistance 
to any transfer was being made some of its participants were 
choosing homes farther out into the country than the proposed 
church location. 

Nevertheless the formation of a second church went on; 
and although it was warmly felt by the majority to be a highly 
unwise action, still no other opposition was presented than a 
declination to divide the already small church valuation 
into two parts. The first meeting of the friends of the second 
church was held on the evening of May 17, 1888, in Nelson 
Hall, Melodeon Building, on Fourth and Walnut Streets, 
but subsequent meetings were in the church vestry on Eighth 
and Plum Streets. At the first meeting articles of incorpora- 
tion of "Unity Church,'' were accepted and Trustees chosen 
to serve until their successors were selected. These were James 
R. Paddack, William H. Knight, William H. Bellows, Albert 
S. Longley, Marcus Ruthenberg, Albert E. Brooks, Charles 
E. Brickett. In the following October, formal services of 
worship were begun in a vacant Universalist Church, on 
Plum Street, between Fourth and Fifth Streets, and Rev. 
Judson Fisher, recently of Alton, Illinois, became the minister. 
He was succeeded by Rev. Leon A. Harvey, who was ordained 
on Wednesday evening, February 5, 1890, the services being 
participated in by Mr. Thayer, who offered the prayer and 
gave the Right Hand of Fellowship, the sermon being by 
Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, of Chicago. Ere long the place of 

48 



worship was transferred to College Hall, Walnut Street, the 
site of the present Mercantile Library building, and for the 
following years until the Spring of 1898, other settled pastors 
were Ehjah A. Coll, December 9, 1891, and George R. Gebauer, 
December 8, 1895. Kindly relations were uniformly main- 
tained between the two congregations, the minister of the 
First Church being a frequent occupant of the Unity pulpit. 
But the drift of population which had compelled the transfer 
to the hilltops in 1889 continued to affect the new venture, 
and within a few years three of its original organizers and 
Trustees, Messrs. Paddack, Longley and Knight had removed 
to California and the accessions of other efficient men and 
women failed to make good the places of those who had gone. 
Mr. Gebauer closed his pastorate to accept a call to Alton, 
Illinois, March 3, 1898; and the Unity Congregation invited 
Mr. Thayer to conduct Sunday evening services in their hall. 
This was done for a few weeks, when it was deemed expedient 
to abandon the enterprise and the members became for the 
most part merged into the First Church. 

With the establishment of the First Church upon the Read- 
ing Road, there came a hopeful influx of new attendants 
increasing the income by a thousand dollars. The completion 
of payment for the new structure had been delayed awaiting 
the sale of the Plum Street building which at length was 
consummated at a price of $32,000. But accumulated interest 
upon the loans and other items had produced an indebtedness 
of $6,800 which was met at a meeting of February 22, 1890, 
by subscriptions in sums from $3,000 to $5. The church 
being paid for, subscriptions were solicited for a new organ. 
The old instrument in the downtown church was sold for 
$700, and a new one contracted for with George S. Hutchings, 
of Boston, which, with the carved oak case given by Mrs. 
Frederick Eckstein, and her son, Frederick Eckstein, Jr., cost 
$3,229. This organ was first used on Sunday, December 7, 1890. 

The gift of the organ case was accompanied during the first 
years of the new building by many other handsome remem- 
brances. October 6, 1889, an oak pulpit, carved by one of the 
distinguished artists of the city, Henry Fry, was presented by 
Mrs. M. E. Ingalls. April 6, 1890, a pulpit bench modelled 
upon antique ecclesiastical lines by Frederick F. Eckstein, 

49 



Jr., was donated by Mrs. George N. Stone. Mrs. John W. 
Miller contributed a pulpit hymn book; Miss Elsie Field an 
embroidered cushion for the minister's bench; Harold Ryland 
a carved contribution plate, which later was supplemented by 
two others given by Mrs. E. Cortlandt Williams, who also 
presented the massive table in front of the pulpit, all in memiory 
of her husband. The elaborate carved oak railing, with its 
many symbolic figures, which was erected in April, 1893, 
was the sequence of the tragic death of its designer, Frederick 
F. Eckstein, Jr., who had sketched it as a future possibility 
for the church, and which, upon his death, his mother caused 
to be completed as a memorial to him. In June, 1893, Miss 
Mary Rawson presented a suitable bookcase, of oak, for the 
loan library which had been collected originally by Sallie 
Ellis and bequeathed by her to the church. In May, 1894, 
Miss C. Belle Fithian gave the unique tract table in memory 
of her mother, Mary E. Fithian. October 30, 1901, a handsome 
and convenient addition to the building, since known as the 
Thornton Room, was dedicated with services befitting the 
memory of the long-time active member of the congregation, 
Mrs. George Thornton, of Clifton, who desired thus to express 
her affection for the Woman's Alliance, and who had made 
this among other benevolent bequests. 

Sunday, May 27, 1900, the Seventieth Anniversary of the 
dedication of the First Church edifice on Race and Fourth 
Streets, was made the occasion of the recognition of a gift 
of a rose window behind the pulpit by the descendants of the 
men and women who had been prominent in the creation 
of the society. The suggestion of such a memorial and the 
largest part of the correspondence connected with the solicita- 
tion of funds for its completion were due to Miss Ellen P. 
Sampson, then of Washington, but for most of her life a worship- 
per with this congregation. The following announcement 
of the service was issued by the Trustees: ''You are invited to 
take part in the services of dedication of a Memorial Window, 
given by the descendants of the founders of the First Congre- 
gational Unitarian Church of Cincinnati. The services will 
be held in the church on the Reading Road and Linton Street, 
Sunday, May 27, 1900, at eleven o'clock a. m., the nearest 
convenient day to the Seventieth Anniversary of the first 

50 



public use of the house of worship, on the corner of Fourth 
and Race Streets. In behalf of the Congregation, M. E. 
Ingalls, Edward Goepper, Joseph W. Wayne, Joseph Wilby, 
Gerrit S. Sykes, Henry C. Peters; Trustees/' 

After a historical sermon by Mr. Thayer, Harold Ryland 
presented the window to the congregation and Joseph Wilby, 
in behalf of the church, made acknowledgment of the gift, 
and Davis Lawler James, Jr., a little boy named from 
Davis Lawler, drew aside the veil. The window is thus 
described in the circular of invitation : 

"The window has as its central object the emblematical 
figure of Truth, with a noble and serious face, dressed in the 
conventional flowing robes of art; in the right hand a sword 
reversed, in the left a flaming torch, upon the left arm a wreath, 
and about the neck a massive key, surrounding the figure as 
a border is a series of antique lamps, each in a scroll containing 
the name of some typical religious virtue: as Truth, Righteous- 
ness, Love, Courage, Patience, Justice, Freedom. The back- 
ground is a rich landscape. The designer is Frederick Wilson, 
of the house of Tiffany and Company, New York. Beneath 
the window is a bronze tablet with this inscription: In grate- 
ful memory of Timothy Flint, William Greene, Abigail Lyman 
Greene, Timothy Walker, Elisha Brigham, George Carlisle, 
Robert B. Bowler, Nathan Guilford, Edmund Dexter, Charles 
Stetson, Rebecca R. Stetson, William Goodman, Charles 
Fisher, James Handasyd Perkins, Sarah Elliott Perkins, 
William S. Sampson, Samuel Davis, Jr., Rowland Ellis, John 
R. Child, Hannah R. Child, James Ryland, Anne Ryland, 
Davis B. Lawler, Rukard Hurd, Charles D. Dana, Sarah 
Lyman Dana, Francis Donaldson, John G. Anthony, Annie 
R. Anthony, William D. Gallagher, Edward Page Cranch, 
Richard B. Field, Elizabeth Dana Field, Joseph Rawson, 
Jacob Hoffner, John K. Coolidge, George H. Hill, John W. 
Hartwell, Founders of the First Congregational Unitarian 
Church of Cincinnati, who by their character and devotion 
made possible its permanence unto this day. Upon the 
Seventieth Anniversary of the dedication of the first house 
of worship this window and tablet are placed here by their 
descendants. May XXIII— MDCCCC' The bronze tablet 
was not ready to be put in place until the following July 25. 

51 



Owing to a reconstruction of the organ, which involved 
the concealment of the first location of the tablet, the latter 
was removed in the winter of 1917 to the western wall of the 
church. The principle of selection of the names to be recorded 
was to fix a definite date, not too remote from the beginning, 
so that some names of active members, which did not appear 
in the church records until a short time after 1840, were 
excluded. It also appeared that some of the persons thus 
commemorated were of short connection with the church, 
following their famihes, or for other reasons, joining other 
congregations of the city. 

Other valuable gifts to the church may properly be here 
included. Mrs. Elizabeth Zinn, who died in March, 1908, 
bequeathed the "First Congregational Church of Cincin- 
nati, known as the Unitarian Church, one thousand dollars 
to be used in providing some work or memorial to beautify 
said church, as a memorial to my son, Charles Davis, deceased." 

Mrs. Louisa H. Lunkenheimer, widow of Frederick Lunken- 
heimer, who died in April, 1913, requested her executors to 
place in the hands of Mr. Thayer, one thousand dollars for the 
church. 

Mrs. Mehitable C. C. Wilson, of Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts, but for many years a resident of this city, bequeathed, 
in 1911, five hundred dollars to the "Unitarian Church of Avon- 
dale." The administrators of this will. The Old Colony 
Trust Company, of Boston, sent this sum, with certain tax 
deductions, to the officers of the church. These three bequests, 
amounting, before they were used to nearly three thousand 
dollars, were appropriated by a vote of the Church Trustees, 
to reconstruction and enlargement of the organ in the Winter 
of 1916-17. May 29, 1910, a sohd table of quartered oak, 
made by the Art Joinery Company, of Cincinnati, from 
whose skill had come the larger part of the artistic furniture 
of the church, was presented to the Woman's Alliance by 
Martin, William and Wright Sampson, in memory of their 
parents William S. Jr., and Virginia W. Sampson, Mrs. 
Sampson having been one of the Alliance Presidents. June 
2, 1907, the portraits of former ministers of the church, some 
of them in oil and others in photograph, were added to in 
the form of a crayon portrait of Ephraim Peabody, given by 

52 



his children, Mrs. Henry W. Bellows, and Francis G. and 
Robert S. Peabody, of Boston. 

For a few years the former functions of the Unity Club 
weekly gatherings were transferred to The Fortnightly, an 
association like the other, including young and old in its 
membership. Gerrit S. Sykes and Frank D. Jamison were 
its Presidents, and its most successful seasons were enjoyed 
in a series of essays and readings upon Lessing's drama of 
Nathan the Wise, Holland, and Colonial New England. But 
the social pressure of a growing city, with its numerous dis- 
tractions and amusements, many of them of an intellectual 
nature, tended steadily to reduce the importance of the church 
as the chief channel of literary expression of the younger 
members of the congregation, and The Fortnightly followed 
the fate of the other Club, and has since had as its successors 
only smaller associations whose appeal has seldom gone 
beyond the congregation. But the Woman's AlHance, 
a branch of a national Unitarian organization of the women 
of the denomination, has been active in promoting literary 
and religious studies, in which they have been assisted by men 
and women outside of the church; and has also maintained 
occasional lectures by people of distinction. One such special 
venture of the Alliance excited a wide interest in the community, 
this being a series of addresses, January 12 to 15, 1893, upon 
the customs and religions of India, by B. Nargarkar, of Bom- 
bay, a representative of the Hindu ethical church, the Brahmo 
Somaj. The Columbian Exposition, held at Chicago during 
the Summer and Fall of 1892, as one of its most impressive 
features held a Congress of Religions in whose deliberations 
were participants from a large number of Oriental faiths, 
conspicuous among them being the various shades of Hinduism, 
one of which was ably represented by Nargarkar. His lectures 
had the permanent effect of contributing to a widening of the 
sympathies of our community in that movement, which was 
fostered by the Columbian Exposition, of recognizing the contri- 
bution of all forms of historical religion, besides Judaism and 
Christianity, to the development of the world's progress. 
Three or four hundred persons attended these discussions and 
its proceeds, above expenses, gave over $200 to the Kinder- 
garten Association. Other notables who have spoken upon our 

53 



platform are Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord, upon ''Emerson 
as I knew him," on April 21, 1903; Nicholas Tschaikowsky 
and Alexis Aleydin, Russian patriots, the latter a member of 
the Duma, the Russian attempt at a national parliament, 
who, on Sunday evening. May 19, 1907, told with powerful 
pathos the story of the struggles of a few leaders for the release 
of their country from its centuries of intolerable absolutism; 
Rev. Reginald J. Campbell of the City Temple of London, 
on Sunday, December 3, 1911; and Dr. Stanton Coit, of the 
West London Ethical Society, on January 31, 1915. 

On Wednesday evening, January 19, 1898, during one of 
the most furious rains of the Winter, which made it impracticable 
for infirm people to face the weather, a reception was given to 
Mr. and Mrs. Thayer in recognition of their fifteen years of 
connection with the church. To this gathering came many 
representatives of the neighboring churches, including clergy- 
men, while letters of cordial good will were received from 
eight ministers, respectively, of Congregational, Episcopalian, 
Methodist and Presbyterian churches, and from a large number 
of Unitarian leaders in the East and West. In addition to 
a lavish display of flowers and flags, throughout the edifice 
whose pews had been removed, a handsome gift of silver was 
made to the special guests of the evening. Nine years later, 
in 1907, the generosity of the congregation and some friends 
of the larger community was manifested in making provision, 
through a large sum of money for a Summer in Europe of the 
Pastor and his wife. 

For special reasons the occurrence of the seventy-fifth 
anniversary of the incorporation of the church was not observed 
in 1905, but on Sunday, January 21, 1906, a large audience 
made up in considerable part of the descendants of the former 
members took part in a service of historical commemoration, 
with a sermon by the pastor in review of religious changes 
during the three quarters of a century, and letters of rejoicing 
from Samuel A. Eliot, President of the American Unitarian 
Association, whose grandfather was the second minister of 
the church; Wilson M. Baclais, Secretary of the Western 
Conference, Moncure D. Conway, and Charles W. Wendte. 
Among the fioral festoons were interwoven the names of the 
ten predecessors of the present minister. 

54 



The financial support of the church had always had as its 
chief dependence the rental of pews, aided by Sunday col- 
lections. But this source had uniformly, from the beginning 
of the church, failed to fully meet the expenditures, and the 
deficiency was made up by occasional solicitations through 
special committees. The habit of a church debt became 
chronic, with much resultant irritation at all of the annual 
meetings; but it was only in 1910 that an intelligent move- 
ment was planned to prevent such yearly arrears. A com- 
mittee of five, composed of the Chairman of the Trustees, 
Edward Goepper, and Casper H. Rowe, Davis L. James, 
Thomas B. Punshon and Fanny B. Webster, undertook to 
raise a fund apart from the pew rentals to be pledged for 
three years, which should cover all the annual outlays of the 
church, including its contributions to the two denominational 
missionary societies, the Western Unitarian Conference and 
American Unitarian Association. This committee performed 
its task with satisfaction and the custom of securing such 
triennial pledges has, from its origin, met all the customary 
appropriations of the church. Extraordinary purposes have 
been dealt with as before, by especial calls for contributions. 
Among such unusual occasions was the meeting of the Western 
Conference of Unitarian Churches, in May, 1915, the Sixty- 
third session during its history, which began in Cincinnati. 
To make this return of the Conference to its birthplace thor- 
oughly pleasant, arrangements were made with one of the 
hotels for the entertainment of a majority of the visitors, 
and the last evening of the meetings was given to a banquet 
at the Sinton Hotel, on Fourth Street, near Vine, at which 
a hundred and eighty persons feasted and took part in expres- 
sions of loyalty to the faith of reason. The chairman of the 
evening was Levi C. Goodale, to whose energy much of the 
success of the hospitality of the week was due; while one of 
the members of the Alliance, Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, 
spoke with exceeding gracefulness and contributed an original 
poem. 

In January, 1911, by the resignation of two of the Trustees, 
a vital question of the proper basis of participation in the 
government of the church became urgent of rational settle- 
ment. From the first the old usage of Congregationalism had 

55 



restricted the business control of the church to the owners of 
pews who were assumed by their investment of money to 
have a more permanent and conservative interest in the 
maintenance of the society than those who were voluntary 
subscribers; since the pews were liable to a regular assessment. 
This control was generally assured by the provision that 
a majority of the Trustees should be pew owners, the other 
members of the congregation having the right to select the 
minority. In the reunion of the Church of the Redeemer 
and the First Congregational Church, in 1876, while it was 
agreed that the voting privilege at business meetings should 
be granted to all persons habitually in attendance upon the 
church services, who were eighteen years of age or older, after 
the approval of their membership by the Trustees, it was 
determined that no disposition of the church property nor 
settlement of a minister should be legal without the concurrent 
vote of a majority of all the pew owners. So long as it con- 
tinued to be customary to own pews by a majority of the 
worshippers, this provision produced no apparent ill effects. 
But in the process of years fewer pews were bought, and eventu- 
ally it happened that in order to meet the requirements of the 
articles of union so as to have available for the office of Trustee 
a majority of pew owners, some legal fiction had to be employed 
to create suitable candidates. Through the recent declination 
to longer serve upon the Board of Trustees of two of the five 
eligible persons and the removal from the city of another, 
the church bade fair to have no legal board of trustees. Accord- 
ingly it was resolved that the Constitution should be amended 
so as to vest the control of all the church interests in the 
church members represented by its Trustees; and on the even- 
ing of May 15, 1911, after due advertisement in the daily 
newspapers, a large number of titles to pews which had lapsed 
from neglect of the putative owners to pay the proper assess- 
ments, were sold at auction and bought by the church treasurer; 
so that with a very few exceptions the congregation now 
obtained full control of its estate. Then the number of Trustees 
was increased from six to seven. 

A noteworthy result of the change in the constitution 
of the church government has been in the establishment 
of periodic meetings of the Trustees, in order to keep in touch 

56 



with the affairs of the congregation, a custom which, if it 
had ever previously existed, had long fallen into neglect. 
From the first years of Mr. Thayer's ministry, an endeavor 
was made to awaken the responsibility of the congregation 
in its administrative business, by bringing about a respectable 
attendance at the regular meetings for discussion of finances 
and the election of officers. This was to a considerable extent 
accompHshed by the estabhshment of a ''parish supper" on 
the evening of the annual business meeting, which, with its 
social aspect, has continued to produce a much larger gathering 
of both sexes than had been wont to appear at such meetings; 
of many of which it was credibly reported that a quorum was 
obtained with much effort; the day of the telephone not having 
come. The parish meetings are now occupied with enter- 
taining accounts from the various departments of church 
activity, such as the Sunday School, the Woman's Alliance, 
the Cheerful Letter Committee, the Post Office Mission and 
a statement by the minister of the progress of the church 
during the year. 

The Woman's AlHance has become one of the most impor- 
tant of the agencies for promoting the welfare of the church. 
At its monthly meetings it has had a wide range of papers and 
studies of rehgion, ethics and benevolence; it also has weekly 
gatherings for work for the poor; and partly under its auspices 
many sermons of the minister have been put into tract form 
and widely distributed. Where the funds of the Alliance 
were not available for such printing private contributions from 
the congregation have been freely offered and upon one occasion, 
at the outbreak of the great tragic European war, a Fourth 
of July discourse by Mr. Thayer was sent abroad at the charge 
of one gentleman to the number of five thousand copies. 
Through these printed utterances of the pulpit a tract table, 
the memorial gift of Miss Fithian, has been constantly supplied 
with material somewhat better adapted to local conditions of 
religious inquiry than the standard literature of the denomi- 
nation which, however, through the publications of the Ameri- 
can Unitarian Association, has been freely used. The annual 
sale and supper, conducted by the Alliance and other women 
of the congregation, has afforded a twofold opportunity of 
attracting to the church many of its friends in other churches, 

57 



who come to buy and to renew old acquaintance, and of adding 
to the church revenues. Many of the costly decorations of 
the walls of the church, and other extraordinary necessities 
have come within the activity of the Alliance. 

In November, 1913, the Board of Trustees, in view of the - 
long service of the pastor, resolved to recommend to the 
congregation that an Assistant pastor be chosen, with duties 
chiefly related to congregational visiting and the manage- 
ment of the Sunday School and other organizations of the 
younger persons of the community. This recommendation 
was approved by a congregational meeting on the evening 
of January 5, 1914, and a committee consisting of James B. 
Stan wood, Thomas B. Punshon, Robert Hochstetter, Mrs. 
Joseph A. Hall and Miss Jessie Gardner, with Mr. Thayer 
ex officio, was appointed to carry out this plan. Its result 
was the selection of Rev. John H. Wilson, of Wilton, New 
Hampshire, but the specific relation of Mr. Wilson's office 
to that of the regular pastor was unfortunately left to be 
worked out by experience, since the intentions of the congre- 
gation were not yet clearly developed; so that Mr. Wilson 
assumed, what was not the understanding of the special 
committee, that he was to become the full minister of the 
church. As a result of this difference of interpretation, he 
preferred to seek a pastorate elsewhere and after nine months' 
service, from September 20, 1914, to May 30, 1915, he resigned, 
later to be settled over the church at Framingham, Massa- 
chusetts. 

In order to accomplish the evident desires of the congre- 
gation to reheve Mr. Thayer of the larger part of the activities 
of the pastorate, it was definitely resolved at a meeting of 
November 19, 1916, that the office of Pastor Emeritus should 
be established, with such compensation as should be mutually 
agreed upon by the Trustees and Mr. Thayer, and that the 
full charge of the ministerial conduct of the church should 
be assumed by Rev. Alson Haven Robinson, of Newton Centre, 
Massachusetts, with whom correspondence had been conducted 
both by the Trustees and Mr. Thayer. With many kindly 
expressions of good will and affection from the officers and 
many members of the congregation, Mr. Thayer definitely 
closed his pastorate on Sunday, January 9, 1916, and on the 

58 



following Sunday, Mr. Robinson assumed the ministerial 
succession, with a simple recognition of his relations to the 
congregation, by the President of the Trustees, Lee A. Ault, 
and a response by the pastor elect. Mr. Thayer's closing 
sermon, entitled ''Work and Wages," was pubHshed by one 
of the parishioners, Miss Webster, and thus what, from its 
unprecedentedly long continuance, had become an old order 
of the church administration whereof many of the younger 
members had never known any other, was merged into a new 
order. 



5y 



MINISTERS OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL 
CHURCH 

Edward B. Hall, from September, 1830, to June 13, 1831. 

Ephraim Peabody, from May 20, 1832, to February, 1836. 

Benjamin Huntoon, from August, 1837, to May, 1838. 

William Henry Channing, from May 10, 1839, to May, 1841. 

Cornelius George Fenner, from June, to November, 1846. 

James Handasyd Perkins, from August 15, 1847, to December 14, 1849. 

(Mr. Perkins acted as occasional supply from 1841.) 
Abiel Abbot Livermore, from May 26, 1850, to July 6, 1856. 
Moncure Daniel Conway, from December 21, 1856, to November, 1862. 

(Charles Gordon Ames occupied the pulpit for some months in 1863.) 
Thomas Vickers, from January 6, 1867, to April 5, 1874. 
Charles Wilham Wendte, from January 19, 1876, to April 16, 1882. 
George Augustine Thayer, from October 5, 1882, to January 9, 1916. 

(Pastor Emeritus from January, 1916.) 
Alson Haven Robinson, January 16, 1916. 

MINISTERS OF THE CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER 

Amory D. Mayo, from January, 1863, to , 1872. 

Charles Noyes, from January 5, 1873, to June, 1875. 

MINISTERS OF UNITY CHURCH 

Judson Fisher, October, 1888. 
Leon A. Harvey, February 5, 1890. 
Elijah A. Coil, December 9, 1891. 

George R. Gebauer from December 8, 1895, to March 3, 1898. 



60 



THE WOMAN'S ALLIANCE 



The local branch of the National Women's Auxiliary- 
Conference of Unitarian and other liberal Christian churches 
was formed in March, 1881. In October, 1890, the name of 
the general association was changed to the National Alliance; 
and in 1913, it became simply The Alliance of Unitarian and 
other Liberal Christian Women. Of this local branch, Mrs. 
Fayette Smith was President from 1881 to 1895. 

Subsequent Presidents have been: 

Miss Fanny Field, 1895-1903. 

Mrs. E. H. Montieth, 1903-1905. 

Miss Fanny Field, 1905-1907. 

Mrs. William S. Sampson, Jr., 1907-1908. 

Mrs. John V. Lewis, 1908-1911. 

Miss Jessie Gardner, 1911-1913. 

Mrs. Davis L. James, 1913-1915. 

Miss Jessie Gardner, 1915. 



61 



TRUSTEES OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL 
CHURCH 



1876- 77— Alphonzo Taft, Robert Hosea, William Wiswell, John Kebler, 
John D. Caldwell, Fayette Smith. Fayette Smith, Treasurer. 

1877- 78— Fayette Smith, President; Theodore Stan wood, Michael Tempest, 
John D. Caldwell, F. W. Clark, Zeph Brown. Zeph Brown, Treasurer. 

1880-81— M. E. Ingalls in place of F. W. Clark. 

1882- 83— Fayette Smith, Theodore Stanwood, Charles A. Kebler, George 
H. Hill, M. E. Ingalls, Aaron B. Champion. Charles A. Kebler, Treasurer. 

1883- 84 — Melville E. Ingalls, Theodore Stanwood, Aaron B. Champion, 
Charles A. Kebler, Herman Duhme, Edward Goepper. Edward 
Goepper, Treasurer. 

1884- 85— No change. 

1885- 86 — M. E. Ingalls, A. B. Champion, Edward Goepper, Charles A. 
Kebler, Herman Duhme, James B. Stanwood, 

1888 — M. E. Ingalls, Joseph W. Wayne, Joseph Wilby, Edward Goepper, 
A. B. Champion, Stephen H. Wilder. Harold Ryland, Assistant 
Treasurer. 

1889— No change. 

1890— 91 — M. E. Ingalls, Joseph W. Wayne, Joseph Wilby, Edward Goepper, 
Stephen H. Wilder, George Hoadly, Jr. 

1892 — Ingalls, Wayne, Wilby, Goepper, Wilder, and Gerrit S. Sykes. 

1893 — Ingalls, Wayne, Wilby, Goepper, Sykes, vacancy. Joseph Wilby, 
Treasurer, 1894 to 1910. 

1895 — Ingalls, Wayne, Wilby, Goepper, Sykes, George Thornton Second. 

1896 — The same Board, except Albert G. Corre in place of Thornton. 

1897— No change. 

1900 — Henry C. Peters in place of Corre. 

1901 — No change. 

1902 — James B. Stanwood, in place of Wayne. 
From 1903 to 1908— No change. 

1909 — Frank D. Jamison in place of Sykes. 

1910 — Casper H. Rowe, in place of Peters. 

1911 — Ingalls, Stanwood, Jamison, Rowe, Thomas B. Punshon, Arthur C. 
Johnson. F. D. Jamison, Treasurer. 

1912 — L. A. Ault, Stanwood, Jamison, Punshon, Johnson, Robert Hoch- 
stetter. 

1913 — Ault, Stanwood, Jamison, Punshon, Johnson, Hochstetter, Davis 
L. James. 

1914 — Arthur H. Morse in place of Johnson. 

1915— The same Board. 

62 



1916 — Hochstetter, President; James, Clerk, Abbot A. Thayer, Treasurer; 
James B. Stanwood, Mrs. N. A. Lloyd, Howard P. Warren, William R. 
Wood. 

Earlier records have not been found except in fragmentary 
form. 

Charles D. Dana was Treasurer in 1830 to 1834. 
John C. Vaughan was Treasurer later. 

The Trustees in 1838-39, were Nathan Hastings, John C. Vaughan, Charles 

Fisher, Benjamin Urner, John S. Child. 
In 1839, Benjamin Urner, WilHam Donaldson, Timothy Walker, John C. 

Hill, J. S. Child. 



PEW OWNERS IN 1830 

The following names appear upon the book of the Treasurer 
of the church, in July, 1830, as purchasers of pews: 



Jedediah Cobb $90 

RukardHurd 80 

Isaiah Whitman 80 

Jesse Smith 120 

Clark and Sprigman 115 

Timothy Kirby 150 

Samuel E. Foote 105 

W. W. Appleton 100 

Thomas Lee 135 

Nathan Guilford 175 

Thomas Bakewell, 2 pews, each 

$175 350 

Christian Donaldson and Co. 

2 pews, at $175 350 

George Carlisle 170 



WilHam Barnes $160 

WilHam Greene 200 

Caleb Bates 190 

Jordan 180 

Thomas H. Yeatman 150 

Timothy Flint 100 

Charles Stetson 200 

William S. Sampson 200 

Robert B. Bowler 200 

Benjamin Urner 200 

Allison Owen 190 

Calvin Fletcher 180 

Charles Fisher 135 

Rice and Chamberlain 130 

Isaiah Thomas, Jr 100 



SUBSCRIPTIONS IN 1830 



Elisha Brigham $500 

Christian Donaldson & Co. . . 300 

Robert B. Bowler 275 

Benjamin Urner 200 

Jedediah Cobb 100 

Josiah Whitman 100 

Allison Owen 100 

George CarHsle 200 

Isaiah Thompson 50 



WilHam Greene $500 

Smith & Co 200 

Thomas W. BakeweU 200 

Nathan Guilford 300 

Jephtha D. Garrard 100 

Caleb Bates 200 

WilHam S. Sampson 100 

Wm. P. Rice and Wm. E. 
Chamberlain 50 



63 



Subscriptions to payment of the church debt, without date, 
but probably between 1830 and 1840: 



Charles Stetson $1000 

C. Donaldson and Co 1000 

Charles Fisher 500 

R. B. Bowler 500 

Edmund Dexter 500 

William Greene 500 

Thomas W. Bakewell 300 

Timothy Walker 250 

Z. Thayer 200 

George CarHsle 200 

Parkhurst 175 

Davis B. Lawler 150 

Calvin Fletcher 100 

Nathan Guilford 100 

Rukard Hurd 100 

Joseph Sampson 100 



WilHam S. Sampson 100 

Thomas G. Lea 50 

John R. Child 50 

George H.Hill 50 

Joseph Bates 25 

Thomas Newell. 25 

Monel 25 

WilHam Goodman 25 

Nathan Hastings . 50 

Caleb Allen 25 

J. Lea 50 

Rowland Ellis . 20 

Charles D. Dana 25 

Joseph Rawson 30 

Paul Anderson 20 



SIGNERS OF THE COVENANT IN 1855 

Names of signers to the Covenant adopted in Mr. Liver- 



more's ministry: 




WilHam Greene 


John H. Osborne 


William Goodman 


Henry Shreve 


John R. Child 


John White 


John Kebler 


Fayette Smith 


WilHam L. Aldrich 


S. H. Longley 


John G. Anthony 


Robert Hogue 


M. Hazen White 


John Colquhoun 


Robert Hosea 


Samuel Davis, Jr. 


Eliza D. Wilder 


Joseph Rawson 


Anne R. Anthony 


Abiel A. Livermore 


EHzabeth D. Livermore 


W. F. Aldrich 


Charlotte L. Thomlinson 


John J. Taylor 


Margaret 0. Spencer 


Charles Stetson 


Anna R. Spencer 


Albert H. Allen 


EHen Manly 


William S. Sampson, Jr. 


Mrs. J. Peters 


James Mullen 


Hannah L. Brown 


Mary M. White 


Ellen D. Dana 


Mary D. DeGraw 


SaHie ElHs 


Mary Louise DeGraw 


EHza A. RusseU 


Manning F. Force 


Clara C. Pratt 


R. R. Stetson 


John DeGraw 


George CarHsle 


Henry TwitcheU 


Sarah P. Dana 


J. A. James 


Charlotte Carey 


Jonathan Mullen 


L. E. A. Kebler 



64 



Anne Ryland 
Louisa M. Keckeler 
A. B. Calhoun 
Mary A. Price 
Elizabeth Price 
Anna Eddowes 
Mary W. Hill 
Deborah Hill 
Caroline H. Allen 
Paul Anderson 
Henry Wescott 
Jenny Logan 
Mary Wright 
E. W. Crowther 
Gilbert Pryor 
A. H. Burckardt 
N. D. Root 
R. W. Root 
Ellen M. Riley 
Joseph Merrill 
James F. Rhodes 
William H. Coolidge 
John M. Edwards 
Sophy A. Whetstone 
Elizabeth Coohdge 
A. B. Williams 
Ruth H. Williams 
L. F. Potter 
Lydia Potter 
M. C. Lea 
James W. Ward 
P. Leonhard 
Alphons W. BUnn 
Samuel E. Mudge 

D. L Manly 
William Spencer 
H. N. Hosea 

H. E. Hosea 
J. B. Russell 
Mary H. Russell 
Samuel Reuss 
George Hoadley, Jr. 
S. Meta Spencer 
S. A. Moore 
A. C. Moore 

E. S. Wiswell 
Annie Gay 
Rebecca H. Sampson 



William S. Sampson 
Elizabeth Sampson 
Fanny Mullen 
S. W. Haseltine 
Minerva N. Haseltine 
J. N. Laboyteau 
WilHam R. Sarle 
Harriet E. Sarle 
Sophia F. Stewart 
M. F. Sampson 
E. G. Eaton 
E. J. Adams 
WilHam D. R. Graham 
Rhoda A. Graham 
Abigail Hastings 
Catharine Hastings 
Susan T. Brigham 
Anna I. Aldrich 
Elizabeth Aldrich 
Susan Aldrich 
Anna J. Aldrich 
Mary H. Smith 
John B. Hatch 
Catharine M. Coolidge 
EHzabeth D. Field 
EHzabeth D. Allen 
Alphonse A. Brunner 
J. C. Christin 
W. S. Carnahan 
Josiah Bridge 
N. R. Meader 
M. T. Meader 
M. Louisa Meader 
Robert Montgomery 
A. G. Negley 
James W. Bryan 
J. 0. Eaton 
John R. Child, Jr. 
Sallie A. Webster 
A. O. Tylor 
Emily Tylor 
Agnes Thompson 
Nannie Burget 
EHza Jane Brown 
L. Currier 
Mary W. Boynton 
Charles Fisher 
J. R. Fisher 



65 



N. Morrill 


John W. Hartwell 


Mary B. Morrill 


Elizabeth S. Hartwell 


Annie S. Hooper 


George A. Wheeler 


Jeremy Peters 


C. Wheeler 


Ada A. Coffin 


W. H. Wright 


Rebecca S. Coolidge 


S. H. Davis 


Jacob P. Whetstone 


Lucy A. Davis 


Mary J. Coolidge 


W. L. Mallory 


Mary B. Robert 


William Wis well, Jr. 


William B. Pierce 


Sarah Wiswell 


E. F. Pierce 


A. H. Lewis 


L. R. Johnson 


Sarah M. Lewis 


Hannah R. Child 


V/ilham H. Wiswell 


Seth Evans 


Aimer a A. Wiswell 


V/inifred M. Evans 


C. Elizabeth Young 


Mary E. Smith 


Lewis Worthington 


Abby B. Greene 


Sallie A. Worthington 


Eleanor Bridge 


Jenny C. Trotter 


Mary E. Brickett 


John C. Trotter 


Esther H. Brickett 


Julietta D. Littell 


E. W. Parkhurst 


J. WilHam Hartwell 


Harriet M. Hartshorn 


R. B. Field 


Frances Child 


Elizabeth Lea Ewing 


Mary Rawson 


Delia Newell 


A. Halsey Nichols 


Emilie U. Addleman 


Marian Nichols 


Emma Bateman 


Joshua D. Dickson 


Barton White 


Elizabeth Urner 


Mary A. James 


D. Nobbs 





SUBSCRIBERS IN 1890 

Subscribers to the completion of the church and purchase of 
an organ, Reading Road and Linton Street, February 22, 1890: 



M. E. Ingalls $3000.00 

Mrs. Frederick Eckstein 
and Frederick Eck- 
stein, Jr 651 . 90 

Mrs. Charles Schmidlapp 600.00 

George H. Hill 500.00 

Joseph W. Wayne 500 . 00 

Morris and Stephen 

Wilder 500.00 

Herman and Edward 

Goepper 300 . 00 

Mrs. T. T. Haydock. ... 300.00 

W. H. Forwood 200.00 

Aaron B. Champion 170 . 00 

Robert Hosea. 125.00 



Joseph Wilby $100.00 

L.B.Harrison 100.00 

E. Cortlandt Williams ... 100 . 00 

Fayette Smith 100.00 

George Thornton 125.00 

C.D.Robertson 100.00 

J. D. Buck 100.00 

Mrs. Herman Duhme .... 100 . 00 
Mrs. Ehzabeth Zinn and 

Charles Davis 125.00 

Mrs. Frederick Lunken- 

heimer 100.00 

R.B. Field 100.00 

Mrs. George N. Stone ... 100 . 00 

J. G. Schmidlapp 100.00 



66 



James B. Stan wood $75 . 00 

Julius Balke 50.00 

Harold Ryland 25.00 

Ellen M. Patrick 25.00 

Daniel and C. B. Fithian 25.00 

J. Frank Hill 25.00 

Gerritt S. Sykes 25.00 

George W.Nye 25.00 

Henry B. Lupton 25.00 



Edward R. Anthony. . . 25.00 



John W. Miller $25.00 

Miss Elizabeth Goepper . . 20 . 00 

W. E. Brotherton 10.00 

Edmund E . Wood 10 . 00 

Jules Sarran 10.00 

William Lodge 10.00 

Louis W. Hoffman 5 . 00 

W. Linn DeBeck 5.00 

Frederick L. Steele 5.00 



CONTRIBUTORS TO THE MEMORIAL WINDOW, 
MAY, 1900 

Timothy FHnt (Miss Phoebe Baker) 

WilHam Greene and Abigail Lyman Greene (Annie, Harry and Frederick 
Roelker) 

Timothy Walker (Mrs. Susan W. Longworth) 

EHsha Brigham (Miss Ellen P. Sampson) 

George CarHsle (John Carhsle, Mrs. Charles Mendenhall) 

Robert B. Bowler (Robert S. Bowler) 

Nathan Guilford (Nathan Guilford) 

Edmund Dexter (Edmund G. Dexter) 

Charles Stetson, Rebecca R. Stetson (Frank A. Lee) 

Wm. Goodman (Mrs. Learner B. Harrison) 

Charles Fisher (Mrs. John A. Tweedy) 

James Handasyd Perkins, Sarah Elliott Perkins (Charles E. Perkins) 
WiUiam S. Sampson (Ellen P., and WilHam S. Sampson, Jr.; Mrs. Annie 

Woodruff) 
Samuel Davis (Mrs. WilHam H. Davis) 
Rowland ElHs (Frank R. ElHs) 

John R. Child, Hannah R. Child (Miss Mary Rawson) 

James Ryland, Anne Ryland (Mrs. Mary Russell, Harold Ryland) 

Davis B. Lawler (Davis L. James) 

Rukard Hurd (Ethan 0. Hurd, Mrs. Richard Folsom) 

Charles D. Dana, Sarah Lyman Dana (Charles Dana) 

Francis Donaldson (Francis Donaldson) 

John G. Anthony, Annie R. Anthony (Edward R. Anthony) 

WilHam D. GaHagher (The Unity Lecture Committee) 

Edward Page Cranch (Davis L. James) 

Richard B. Field, Elizabeth Dana Field (Fannie, Elsie and Walter Field) 
Joseph Rawson (Miss Mary Rawson) 
Jacob Hoffner (Mrs. Jacob Hoffner) 
John K. CooHdge (Mrs. Nathan Hill) 

George H. HiU (Mrs. AHce H. Brown and Mrs. Sophie Boyd) 
John W. HartweU (Mrs. Carrie H. Fiske) 



67 



ORDER OF SERVICES AT THE DEDICATION OF THE 
FIRST CONGREGATIONAL UNITARIAN CHURCH, 
OF CINCINNATI, READING ROAD AND LINTON 
STREET, WEDNESDAY EVENING, MARCH 27, 1889, 
AT 7.30 O'CLOCK. 1830-1889. 



L Organ Voluntary. 

II. Choral (Old Hundred), to be sung by the Congre- 

gation, standing. 

Be Thou, 0 God, exalted high, 
And as Thy glory fills the sky, 
So let it be on earth displayed. 
Till Thou art here as there obeyed. 

III. Responsive service, by Minister, Rev. Chas. J. K. 

Jones, of Louisville, and the Congregation. 

How lovely are Thy dwellings, 0 Lord of Hosts. 

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; 
my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. 

Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house: they will still be 
praising Thee. 

Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee, in whose heart 
are Thy ways. 

For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand. I had 
rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than dwell in 
the tents of wickedness. 

The Lord God is a sun and a shield. The Lord will give 
grace and glory. No good thing will He withhold from them 
that walk uprightly. 

I was glad when my companions said unto me, come, it is 
our holy day. 

Let us go into the house of the Lord, let us take sweet counsel 
together. 

68 



11 




Reading Road and Linton Street — 1889 



Let our feet stand within His gates, and heart and voice 
give thanks unto Him. 

Blessed he the temple hallowed by His name, pray for peace 
within its walls. 

Peace to young and old that enter here. Peace to every 
soul abiding therein. 

For friends and brethren's sake, I will never cease to say: 
Peace be within thee. 

What though for Him, who filleth heaven and earth, there 
can be no dwelling made with hands! 

What, though His way is in the deep, and His knowledge too 
wonderful for us\ 

0 Lord, when we cry unto Thee from the deep, and wait 
for Thee as they that wait for the morning! 

Thou wilt have regard to our entreaty: the sigh of the lowly 
Thou wilt not despise. 

Let the dead and the living praise Thee, 0 God, above, 
below; let all the generations praise Thee. 

Let angels in the height praise Thee, who dwellest in the heavens. 

Let Thy church on earth praise Thee, the delight of whose 
wisdom is the children of men. 

0, house of the Lord's praise, peace be to them that love Thee. 

IV. Prayer, to be said by Minister and People. 

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy 
name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as 
it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and 
forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, and lead 
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For 
Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory 
forever. Amen. 

V. Choral response by Choir. 

Glory be to God, most high, the ever blessed Father, 
Who is, and was, and shall be, world without end. Amen. 

69 



VI. Anthem Duet. The Lord is my Shepherd. 



VII. Selection from the Old Testament, by Rev. David 

Philipson, of Mound Street Temple. 

VIII. Hymn. Written for this dedication by Mrs. Alice 

Williams Brotherton. Read by Rev. E. W. Whitney, 
of the Universalist Church. 

(Tune, Arlington. The Congregation will rise and sing.) 

Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. 

Ps. cxxvii,, 1. 

Our Father, here our ark we rest, 

Our temple walls we rear; 
O, may the place by Thee be blest, 

Thy mercy seat be here. 

Except the shaping hand be Thine, 

In vain our work is done; 
Make strong these beams, with love divine. 

Make faith our corner stone. 

Lord, while these walls we dedicate, 

0, consecrate each will 
Upon Thy call to haste or wait. 

To work Thy bidding still. 

Be with us in this holy place, 

And in our daily lives; 
In chanted hymn we'll render praise, 

In soul, that silent strives. 

Then let the path be long or brief. 

We can not go astray; 
In gleam of joy or cloud of grief, 

Thou leadest day by day. 

IX. Selections from New Testament, by Rev. A. G. Jen- 

nings, of Toledo. 

X. Dedication prayer, by Rev. Frederick L. Hosmer, of 

Cleveland. 

XI. Response by the Choir. 

XII. Sermon by Rev. Minot J. Savage, of Boston. 



XIII. Anthem, Benedictus in E. 

70 



XIV. Dedication Sentences, to be read by the Minister of 

this Church, Rev. George A. Thayer, and the Congre- 
gation, all standing. 

We have built this house to be a house of prayer, a house of 
thought, a house of love, and of united action. 

We now dedicate it to these high uses. 

We dedicate it to the worship and love of God, in Whom 
we live, and move, and have our being. 

We dedicate it to the love of man, to the spreading of the 
gospel of peace and good will which Jesus taught, and to all 
that may bless and uplift human lives. 

We dedicate it to free and earnest thought, to the study of 
truth, to an ever increasing insight, to an ever advancing 
knowledge. 

To the Holy Spirit of purity and love, to the sweet breathing 
of God in our hearts, to the Spirit of Christian Communion, 
we dedicate this place. 

And may the blessing of the Infinite Father crown our work. 

0 Lord, establish Thou the work of our hands upon us. 
Yea, the work of our hands, establish Thou it. 

XV. Hymn, written for this dedication by Mrs. Virginia G. 

Ellard. Read by Rev. Judson Fisher, of Unity 
Church. 

(Tune, Marlow. To he sung by the Congregation, standing.) 

0 Lord, from out the builder's hand, 

We consecrate to Thee 
This house of prayer, and trust its walls 

Thy fitting shrine may be. 

O let Thy benediction rest 

Upon our worship here 
And may we feel with reverent hearts, 

Thy holy presence near. 

But better than in walls of stone, 

Thy temple shall be found, 
Within the throbbing heart of man. 

Where love and grace abound. 

71 



The altar's flame, when kindled bright 

With pure aspiring thought, 
Will light the soul to truer bliss 

Than earthly pleasures brought. 

For warm in every human life 

Shall glow the spark divine. 
Redeemed by truth, our eyes shall see, 

Thy glory which is Thine. 

XVI. Benediction by the Minister of the Church. Choral, 
Amen. 



Trustees and Building Committee of the Church 

M. E. Ingalls A. B. Champion Joseph W. Wayne 

Joseph Wilby Edward Goepper 

Stephen H. Wilder 



Minister 

George A. Thayer 



Choir 

Organist, F. D. Jamison 
Miss Alice Goepper Miss Frances L. Taft Joseph Wilby 
Charles L. Harrison 



The pews will be rented by auction, on Saturday Evening 
March 30, at 8 o'clock 



72 

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